


all the king's horses & all the king's men (couldn't put me back together again)

by Coshledak



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-14 03:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14127441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coshledak/pseuds/Coshledak
Summary: "Do you intend to remain alone, Emperor Ling Yao?"It's been three years since Amestris and Ling is now respectfully regarded as Emperor Ling Yao of Xing. Sort of. Being such a young emperor isn't easy. And then there's the matter of the gaping hole in his aura, and his frequent dreams of Greed...He knows that he misses him, but no amount of missing him is going to bring him back.Greed doesn't have to be such a bastard about it, though.





	1. Chapter 1

“Emperor Ling Yao?”

Lan Fan’s voice startles him from his reverie, staring out onto the courtyard. It’s spring, and the trees are still splashed with beautiful pink blossoms that are falling across the grass and the gravel walkway when faced with the slightest breeze. It weaves around a pool of water to a bridge that crosses it at its smallest point. It disappears into tall hedges some ways out from where he’s kneeling on the wooden walkway that frames the outside edges of the palace. He didn’t even realize he’d been drifting across his own mental pool, submerged just enough that coming to his senses is jarring.

“Yes?” He turns to look at her, and she’s kneeling on one knee next to him. Her fist—the organic one—is planted on the wood in front of her and her head is respectfully bowed. Since he took the throne it’s as though the nightmare in Amestris never happened. If one didn’t look at Lan Fan’s automail arm, if one hadn’t heard the stories, then they might not believe that it did. She’s gotten so used to it in the past three years that it’s as if it’s always been a part of her.

“Are you alright?” She’s breaking protocol to ask it, but he doesn’t mind.

He grins a little. “You just called me Emperor Ling Yao. Why wouldn’t I be alright?”

There’s clearly a conflict playing out in her mind, though, by the way she purses her lips together. She ducks her head again, but he’s already seen it. He knows he doesn’t have to ask, though, she’ll tell him what’s on her mind if he looks at her long enough.

“It’s just that…ever since we returned from Amestris…” Her thoughts aren’t pieced together, and he thinks that she’s regretting pursuing this line of conversation. But he isn’t going to let her off the hook just for that. The name Amestris has forced his attention, and his expression levels out. “It just seems like, since you’ve taken up the mantle of Emperor, something still isn’t…right. At first I didn’t notice it because of the haste, but now it's—“

“I’m alright, Lan Fan,” he answers, his voice soft. She lifts her head to look at him, so he can see her dark eyes set in the mask, and he smiles, in the hopes of dissuading her from further inquiry. “Being Emperor of Xing is all I’ve ever wanted. There’s no need for me to be greedy.”

———

Establishing peace throughout Xing—a proper peace—is no easy task. Being the only one to return with a Philosopher’s Stone, Ling’s claim to the throne had been unquestioned though certainly not universally accepted. Assassination attempts are nothing he isn’t already used to, having been an heir before this, but he has dared to hope that, perhaps someday, they will stop. As of this past winter, his father is no longer around to exercise his authority in easing the minds of his people. A people that are now Ling’s to care for, though they may resist it.

“This is _unheard of_!” The patriarch of the Wu family calls, slamming a hand on the table meeting table. “Are you telling me that you aim to exclude our family from the unification of Xing?”

 _For the millionth time…_ “No, Clansman Wu, that is not what I’m saying,” he replies, trying to focus on keeping his shoulders straight and his chin high. His back hurts. He’s used to slouching a little, and sitting cross legged, not kneeling and pulling his shoulders back. “What I’m suggesting is simply that the ceremonial marriages be done away with entirely. What have they done for our country but lead to bloodshed and murdered children?”

“They’re symbolic of the cohesive Xing Empire—“

“They are a frail grapple for control,” Ling counters, frowning. His father’s voice sternly reminds him, in the back of his head, that he’s not to cut off his clansmen in meetings like this. Ling tries to pause, to return the floor to Wu, but the damage has been done. He fights down the urge to sigh—another thing he was told not to do—and presses on. “I want the people of Xing to be _truly_ united as brothers and sisters. The marriage and designation of heirs only breeds competition and contempt between us.”

The representative of Wu frowns and sits back, clearly seething even as he now bites his tongue. At the very least, it allows Ling to address the table. A table of people that are, for the most part, older than him. He takes a breath and tries to keep himself steady as he carries on.

“I was my father’s heir. I was the twelfth of _fifty_ , and each of us vied for the throne,” he explains. “Those of us who represent our clans this way face assassination attempts from the day we’re born, with no choice but to kill or be killed, before we even understand why it’s happening. This isn’t unification, this is a bloodsport that we call tradition. How many from my pool alone survived to receive the Elixir challenge that my father issued?”

He looks across the table now and their age shows in a different way, not as power but as people who have lost sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandchildren to this vile custom. Some look angry, and others look deeply pained. What scares him most are those who look deadened. The one from Wu, who glares at him now like a fighter waiting for the next round. A person who has written off Ling’s ascension to the throne as a loss and has already set his sights on winning next time.

What’s sets off his instincts about that is that he’s only eighteen. By all rights, Clansman Wu won’t be alive to “win” next time, but he doesn’t look like a man who’s fazed by that information.

“We are not cohesive so long as we bring children into this world for the purpose of political gain,” he says, this time with finality. “We will—”

“Do you not intend to marry someone from Xing, Emperor Ling Yao?”

This inquiry does not come from Wu, but from the female head of the Fau clan. She’d looked pained a moment ago, but now she looks focused.

He knits his brow and frowns in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“If you were to marry and have a child with someone from Xing, does that not give that clan an unreasonable hold on the land?” She continues, but steadily rather than with accusation. “You may be level-headed, but who’s to say such a thing will last in your stead? There are _generations_ of strife and bitterness between us. The imbalance of power that arises may lead to a war as one clan gains control. The only way to prevent such a thing is to not give any clan such an advantage.”

“I…” But he trails off, his brow creasing further. Though the representative from Wu may be smirking, and Ling can feel that he is, the one from Fau is not. Her question is plainly presented, and he can already hear the table starting to stir in response.

“I’ll ask you again, Emperor Ling Yao: Do you intend to marry someone outside of the Xing Empire? Or do you intend to remain alone?”

———

_The sky is a heavy blue beneath his feet, and when he looks up he sees Xing in the sky. It’s upside down, though, with its temples and houses all pointing towards him. People should be falling with the shift in gravity. Some part of him knows this, but they aren’t. They’re walking on the surface like nothing’s happened. Maybe for them nothing has happened. He can see them, their feet stuck to the ground. He tries to reach a hand out, but he’s no more capable of touching Xing than anyone in Xing is capable of touching the sky._

_Then, without sign or warning, he’s falling. He’s falling away from Xing. The blue of the sky and white of the clouds smear and smudge around him as he falls deeper and deeper into them with nothing to grab onto to slow his descent. Or is it an ascent? The lack of gravity makes his stomach jump up to his throat and he doesn’t know where he’s falling until he sees a distant speck of black._

_The moment he notices it, it expands rapidly, swallowing him up, and he realizes that it’s not just black. It’s red with gaping black mouths and hollow black eyes swimming rapidly past him, a sea of the lost souls of Xerxes. But as he notices it, he realizes that he’s finally still. When he looks up he can see the blue and white sky beyond the tunnel, but it’s no longer shrinking. He’s no longer falling._

_Though the swirling in the tunnel has no more footing than the sky did, he can stand. He remembers how to stand here, in this place that existed inside of his head for what feels like forever and also like a blink in time._

_“Like coming home, eh, kid?”_

_“What!?”_

_The words shoot through him and leave a searing pain in his chest but he impulsively turns to the voice anyway. There’s nothing behind him but the swirling wall, the mass of souls._

_“C’mon, that’s the oldest trick in the book.”_

_He spins around again and this time he can see him. It’s so strange. He’s looking at the back of his own body. The back of his head and shoulders that he somehow recognizes despite having never seen it himself. Not this way. When he spoke to Greed in his mind before he’d always been the face of his Ultimate Shield, just a hovering, static picture._

_“This is no place for you, pissant,” Greed says, and turns his head just a little. A little, but Ling suddenly needs more. He can’t see his face this way. Does it look like his? Or does it look like Greed’s? He needs to know. The burning need to know makes him almost sick._

_“You’re still here,” Ling says, and his voice is shaky with a desperate need to believe it. “Greed, you’re still here. I knew you couldn’t be completely gone. You wouldn’t be The Avaricious if you didn’t get to undo Father and live—“_

_Suddenly Greed is laughing. It’s a bark of a sound, like he wants to interject it as hard as possible into the space between Ling’s words. There’s something in it that makes Ling’s chest throb again and he reaches his hand to grip at his chest. He starts walking towards him but when he takes his first step he sinks, ankle deep, into the swirling souls. They’re mud around his feet, slowing him down, but somehow his urgency only grows._

_There’s something in the sound of Greed’s laugh that makes him reach for him. The pain in his chest spreads. “Greed, don’t!”_

_He doesn’t even know what he’s asking him not to do, but he can sense it in the air. The words rise inside of him like an instinctual reaction to a stimulus he can’t identify._

_“Sorry, kid—“_

_Then Ling sees it, with horror, he sees that Greed’s form is dissipating right in front of him. There’s a hole open in Greed’s chest and he can see clear through it, to the souls on the other side. There’s no blood, no bone, no gore at all, just a black sort of static as he fragments apart. He’s still not facing him. Ling screams in indignation at how trapped he is and sinks further into the muck, until it comes up to the middle of his calves and he loses his balance trying to move through it. He hits all fours, but the angry need inside of him presses on._

_“Don’t you do this to me again, dammit! Listen to me for once!”_

_Greed tips his head back, looking towards the sky. “You need to move on. This is pretty pathetic, don’t you think?”_

_“Greed!” The swirling of the souls starts to carry him with it, quickly. He’s being pulled further and further away from Greed, back towards the opening to the tunnel. Back towards the unfamiliar, vast, terrifying blue sky over Xing. In a last ditch effort, he reaches his hand out again, but in a blink he’s been pitched back out of the tunnel._

“Greed!”

He screams the name as he sits up in bed, his arm outstretched, choking on the pain in his chest to the point that calling out makes him start coughing. He grips at the blankets with his other hand, not lowering the one he’s reaching into open air. Into darkness. Into nothing.

His heart pounds away in his chest so hard that his hands are shaking. He pulls his hand, his left hand, back to cover his face with it, feeling the wet tracks on his cheeks as he breathes through gritted teeth. “Dammit.”

———

“One of the chamber guards said you called out in your sleep last night,” Lan Fan says. “And you don’t look like you slept well.”

“It’s only stress,” he explains, tiredly, and yawns. “I’m trying to run an empire, Lan Fan. That isn’t exactly easy work. Some things are bound to come up.”

He can feel her worried gaze digging into his temple as a surrogate for his eyes, since he won’t turn to face her. He remembers, without warning, Greed’s face shadowed, showing him only his back, refusing to look at him. _Why?_ He moves the hand not holding his calligraphy brush to cover his face, suddenly dizzy. 

“Emperor—“

“I’m fine!” He doesn’t like to shout, not at anyone if he can help it, but hearing her nearly rise out of her seat makes him snap. He doesn’t want her to touch him. He doesn’t want anyone to touch him. He lowers his hand and looks back to his scroll work. “Please, Lan Fan. Stop worrying.”

She goes quiet, which he knows to mean that the conversation will stop here. Still, he has to abandon his calligraphy because his hand won’t stop shaking.

———

The dreams are not new.

In fact, he’s had them with some regularity ever since the fateful day that he and Greed were separated. For three years after returning to Xing he found ways to throw himself into preparing to become Emperor. He had a lot of training to do that was different from the martial studying he’d done up to this point. Under his father’s protection, he hadn’t had to worry about assassins. It would, after all, be treason to kill him now.

But even throwing himself into his training as hard as he could didn’t stop the dreams. He had to sleep eventually, whether by relenting to go to bed on his own or by passing out on a scroll or book in the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t avoid his dreams, though he was desperate to. He is still, to this day, seeking some amnesty from the pain they bring.

They’re always the same: he falls, unable to stop, until he’s inside the comfortable horror of souls that once made up Greed’s existence. There, he finds his footing again. He’s soothed. He’s safe. 

Always Greed stands there with his back to him, never looking at him. Always he tells him to move on. Always he reaches for him with that urgency burning in his chest, a need he can only match with the one he felt to become Emperor.

And always he’s pulled away from him.

Always he wakes up with tears having already carved new trails down his cheeks.

Always he wakes up to silence.

Always he wakes up alone.

———

“General Mustang and Lieutenant Hawkeye, welcome to Xing,” Ling says, pressing his palms together in front of his chest and bowing to his guests.

Three weeks after his nightmare, he has a diplomatic meeting with Amestris about trade routes through the desert. It’s something he’s been looking forward to, and that's only amplified after the nightmare. He’s thrown himself into his work as much as he can, trying to scrub out both the memory of Greed’s voice and Fau’s question: _Or do you intend to remain alone?”_

Mustang and Hawkeye both bow back, respectfully, with their military hats already tucked under their arms. He smiles and turns, leading them to his conference table. Roy holds Riza’s arm, following her lead. “How was the trip?”

“Well, it was through the badlands,” Roy replies with some humor. “So I can’t say that it was pleasant.”

Ling laughs. Though he knows it’s not that funny, he needs it to be. He needs the chance to laugh. “I suppose that’s fair. Hopefully we can settle on some ways to make it less grueling for our traders. Please, have a seat.”

He adjusts his robes so that he can kneel properly and comfortably on the cushion at the head of the table, gesturing for Roy and Riza to sit to his right. They’ll be the only ones in this meeting, considering he doesn’t think that he needs to bring the clan representatives in on it yet. They already know that it’s coming, though, and trade with Amestris is nothing that any of them should be jumping to reject. Even with Xing’s somewhat isolationist traditions, he hasn’t met much resistance when it comes to trade. Most of what he has met he’s been able to peaceably persuade to his side.

“Before we get to business,” he says, in his most formal voice, just so he can break it a moment later with a grin. “How is everyone?”

Smiles play on both of their faces, the formality done away with even if only temporarily. It’s Hawkeye who speaks up first, “Winry visited last week to show us Edward’s letters. Apparently, he’s learning a great deal from his studies in the West. He’ll be coming home soon.” 

“Wonderful!” Ling says, genuinely relieved to hear it. “Alphonse and Mei have also made some great strides in his alkahestry studies, they tell me. I imagine he’ll be able to bring a great deal of knowledge back to Amestris with him when he’s ready to return. Mei has even mentioned returning with him.”

“That’s good to hear,” Riza says. “But won’t she miss home?”

Ling smiles, knowingly, and tips his head. “I imagine she would miss Alphonse more.” Righting himself again, he carries on. “And your Ishvalan policies are still holding up well?”

“The hate crimes are lower than they’ve ever been,” Roy says by way of agreement. “We’ve also got the desert settlements all finished now and had the last of the volunteers pulled out a few months ago. The rest is up to the Ishvalans themselves.”

“It’s lucky that they’re willing to help us with the trade passages,” Riza adds on. “We’ve had a few points of tension over the past three years, but I think that the desire for catharsis is stronger than the animosity.”

Ling nods. “Yes, that’s what I believe as well. We’ve already sent envoys to and from their settlements in the ruins with some resources as a show of good faith. I’m only sorry we were unable to help more with the actual construction.”

“It’s alright,” Roy says. “Amestris had a debt to repay and plenty to give.” He turns his blind eyes towards Ling. “And how is being emperor? Is it everything that you hoped?”

Ling smiles wide, “And then some!” He folds his fingers together, resting his wrists against the edge of the table as he bows his head slightly. “I do have some very high hopes for Xing and its people, but progress is slow. I’m hoping that the booming trade routes will instill some faith in them that I’m qualified for my position." His brows furrow. "I want my merit to be based on more than just winning the hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Riza’s hand appears in his vision, reaching so it rests on the table in front of him, and he lifts his head to look at her. Her expression—mostly her eyes—are reassuring. “I’m sure they’ll see it, Ling. Just give it time.”

_It’s been almost a year since anyone’s just called me “Ling…”_

For a moment he’s stunned at the words, at her comfort, but he quickly smiles and bows his head. “Thank you, Lieutenant.” He takes a breath and lets it out, picking up the map at his side and unfurling it across the table. “Well, shall we get started?”

———

That night, long after Mustang and Hawkeye have left to meet up with Mei and Alphonse, he sits alone in his room. Incense burns, filling the space with a comforting spice that’s eased a little by the crack he’s left open in the window. He breathes deeply, sitting cross legged on the floor, finally divested of his traditional clothing and left in loose pants and no shirt. He presses his fingertips together gently, tipping them down towards the floor and pointing his thumbs towards the ceiling.

He closes his eyes and tries to relax, starting it at the top of his head and imagining it moving down his scalp, his face, his neck. It goes across his shoulders and spread down his back until he’s relaxing forward a little bit, the way he used to before the universe shoved a pole arm into his spine.

He imagines himself holding the heavy thoughts of the day on strips of paper and letting them go on the breeze trickling through his window. He tries to think of it as the sort of wind that sometimes snagged things from his hand as a child, taking them out of his reach, beyond hope of catching. That’s what he wants to happen with his thoughts.

Then he tries to focus himself inward. He pictures his own body, then his physical form dissolving away into an aura—

—the image of Greed’s body, dissolving from the chest outwards, hits him in the back of the head.

He grits his teeth, realigning his fingers from where they slipped apart at the shocking intrusion of that image. Pain that pulses through his chest. He talks, quiet but aloud, “I know you’re in there, Greed. Stop hiding.”

He hears nothing.

“C’mon,” he continues. “What is it? You realized being Emperor of Xing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?”

Silence.

This time he grits his teeth, the tension coming back through his body with the power of an electrical shock. “Don’t you ignore me, you bastard! I know that you’re in there somewhere! Stop screwing with me!”

…nothing. Just the sound of his own heartbeat, now angry and fervid in his chest. He wrestles it under control. He breathes again, but this time the relaxation that goes through him is something closer to an exhausted defeat.

“Fine,” he concedes, softer. “Be that way.”

This time, as he goes back to picturing his aura, it comes into focus. His body dissolves away like a fading mist, leaving nothing but the glow from his chakras lighting up an illuminated form of where he once stood, a bodily figure, in his mind. And as Ling focuses closer he finally sees what he knew to be there all along. What’s been there every time he meditates over the past three years.

He sees a gaping hole in his chest.

———

Clansman Fau pays him an independent visit shortly after Mustang and Hawkeye have departed for Amestris again. Seeing her outside of the conference room, she acts more like a grandmother or aunt to him than the stern woman who asked him if he would be alone forever.

“You have to understand,” she says, gently, patting his arm. “I didn’t mean any harm, truly. But you are young, Emperor Ling Yao, and some part of me knew that you hadn’t yet considered that, had you?”

They’re walking around the courtyard, making their way slowly over the bridge and towards the hedges. He supposes that he should scold her for taking his arm so easily, but there’s something comforting about the touch. He’s never put much merit into physical contact, but it’s not until now that he realizes how much he’s gone without it since becoming Emperor.

“I had not,” he admits, with some defeat. She’s smiling at him, very much like an adult humored to have caught a child in a riddle. He looks forward again as they step over the bridge, making sure to keep a steadying hand on her, though he supposes she’s not that old. “I’ve been considering your inquiry very deeply, Clansman Fau, but I haven’t yet arrived at a satisfactory answer.”

“Is there such a thing?” She asks. “It’s a great burden to be brought upon someone so young. It’s an impossible choice I’ve put before you, and I’m sorry to have done it.”

“Impossible…?” He pauses and she lets go of his arm so that he can turn to look up at where she’s standing on the bridge.

She looks down at him, concerned. “Xing has been primarily isolated up to this point with great success. Marrying someone outside of Xing may bring backlash. But likewise, spending your life alone is no better option. Especially not for one so young.”

He hadn’t considered the former, that the people of Xing might reject him marrying outside of the Xingese people. Even if it wasn’t for political gain, the idea of bringing in an outsider…not to mention the natural assumption that he would instate them as proper heirs to becoming emperor. 

As he watches her now, though, and listens to her, he understands her game. Quickly he calculates the best way to approach it.

He smiles. “I’m sure I’ll figure something out, Clansman Fau. Even in my youth, I’ve learned that sometimes people get set into a way of thinking and it takes an outside perspective to present ideas that they may not even fathom.”

 _There it is._ A subtle shift in her expression. It’s there and gone in an instant and he’s certain anyone less skilled in observation would have missed it. He almost missed it himself, and she hides it with an easy smile and sheepish laugh.

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” she says. “Perhaps your time in Amestris did teach you more than I had estimated.”

“You flatter me,” he replies, and offers her his arm and she takes it, gently. As she settles to his side he feels a prick and pulls away. “Ouch!”

“Oh! What is it?”

“Something in your sash poked me,” he says, looking at it. She frowns and gently feels along the sash, pulling out a decorative pin. 

“Oh, dear, I’m sorry. One of my pins seems to have gotten turned,” she explains, adjusting it to so that it’s holding up the fabric properly. “I didn’t hurt you too much, did I?”

“No, only surprised me,” he replies. “I’m surprised that it managed to get through all the layers.”

She laughs. “Well, it does have to pin through all of mine, doesn’t it?” She pats her sash now that it’s fixed. “There. Shall we?”

He offers her his arm again, a little wary, but this time there is no jab, and they continue towards the hedge.

“Now, what was I saying?”

“My time in Amestris…”

“Oh, yes, and how much it’s helped you to grow,” she agrees. “I’m not sure even your father could have predicted how much the quest for the Elixir would have helped you to become so wise.”

Ling tries to relax, somewhat put out of sorts by the pin. “Yes.”

“But then,” she says, with consideration, as they round the hedge. “Maybe that’s made you forget how we do things in Xing.”

Ling’s eyes widen.

“Your voice…” He looks at her and his vision swims, that previously ‘out of sorts’ feeling escalating so rapidly that he wobbles as he comes to the ground, landing on his hands and knees, feeling sick. “Poison…?”

“Smart,” the considerably younger voice in front of him says, crouching down. He barely has to lift his head to look at her, but she’s still in multiples. He sees four of her overlapping. Something glints in her hand. “So maybe you _haven’t_ forgotten how we do things in Xing, but it’s still not going to help you now.”

He knows that voice. He recognizes it from multiple fights, from assassination attempts that turned to battles that turned to strategic retreats. From challenges issued in broad daylight. From the bold claim that _she_ would be the one to find the elixir before him. That she would bring the Yao clan to its knees as retribution for her multiple failed attempts on his life. He knows that voice.

“Feng…Wu…”

She grabs his hair and forces his head back, until he meets her eyes. She’s still wearing the disguise of Fau, but he recognizes her eyes now. He should have recognized them before. He _did_ recognize them before, but he brushed it off as a familiar _game_ instead of a familiar _person._

_Idiot, idiot, idiot._

“Game over, Ling.” She holds up the metallic object in her hand—the pin from her sash.

_Dam…mit…_

When she lets go of his hair his body is too heavy to hold up. He slumps to the ground, the blurriness of his vision turning mottled, then fading out completely.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the nice reviews on the first chapter! I really appreciate them, and if you leave a review from a signed-in account then I'll try to reply to you! I want you guys to know how important it is to me that you review; it's what keeps me going! : )
> 
> This fic is going to update on Thursdays until it's completed! c:

He’s in the courtyard of Central City’s military base. There’s a crater in the ground, the same one made during their fight with Father, except that no one is here. No Briggs’ soldiers. No cheering chimera. Not even the Elric brothers. It’s just the empty courtyard with the crater and him.

He walks a little further into it, towards the center of the crater, but it doesn’t seem to get any closer. He starts running, but nothing changes then, either. Looking around, he realizes he’s where he was when Father impaled him…and absorbed Greed.

“Dammit,” he curses, curling his fingers into his palm. “Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t you just leave me in peace? Greed!”

He turns and looks towards the hovering form in the sky, maybe about ten feet off the ground ahead of him. It’s sitting, but not facing him, his legs crossed. He doesn’t answer him, either.

Ling’s jaw shakes as he clenches it. In fact, his whole body is shaking from how tight he feels, like his muscles have never known relaxation. But neither have they gotten used to constant tension, either. “Answer me, you coward!”

“Weren’t you the one who said something like ‘you can’t just erase friends from your soul?’”

He’s taken aback. This is the first time Greed’s ever answered him, instead of just talking over him. In all of the other dreams he just talks over him, calls him a pissant and pathetic. It’s always been like Greed couldn’t even hear him, like he was talking to himself about Ling instead of talking to Ling himself. 

But the shock doesn’t last long. Talking to Greed isn’t something that’s new to him.

“You’re using my own words against me?” He asks, quietly, before shouting. “You lied to me, Greed! You made me think that we’d fight him together and then you abandoned me! How are you still here? It’s been three years!”

“Who says I’m still here?”

“What?” Ling breathes, surprised. “What do you mean?”

Greed rubs the back of his neck with a short groan of annoyance. “C’mon, kid, isn’t it obvious? I’m just a bunch of memories you won’t let go of. You’ve got this whole thing wrong.”

“No, I don’t! You’re still inside me somewhere. I can feel it!”

“Then why do you have that big hole in your aura?”

Ling almost chokes on his words, on air. No, not on air. On something thick and vicious that slides down the back of his tongue and blocks his airway. It hits him so suddenly from nowhere, but then the dream itself chases it away. Not fast enough to keep his chance to reply to Greed, however, before he carries on.

“That’s right, I can see it, too. I might not be good with sensing that kind of shit but it’s pretty obvious with how much you’ve been focusing on it lately. You think you’d have that if I was still around?”

All of the shaking that his body’s been doing, all of that tension, suddenly releases and he falls to his knees, putting a hand over his chest. Except that when he tries it goes right through, his eyes widening as he looks down to see the gaping hole that cuts right through him. He still can’t find words. He wants to, he desperately wants to shut Greed up. To make him _stop._

“Face it, kid, you’re all mixed up. You got so used to having me in your head that you think it’s the same thing when I’m in your dreams, but it’s not. Not by a long shot. I’m just a bunch of memories that only come up when you’re unconscious.” He lets out a breathless sort of ‘heh’, tipping his face up towards the sky. “We had a pretty good run, though. I can’t blame you for wanting to hold onto it.”

“ _No._ ” Ling gasps quietly, trying to cover the hole in his chest as if that will help it to close. He wraps his arms around himself as tight as he can, then curls forward onto his forehead. “No! You’re wrong!”

“You think I’d _pick_ this, you little pissant? Having to see that pitiful look of yours every time we go through this? Huh!?” Greed shouts, and Ling can hear the annoyance in his voice. Then, with something else, something quieter and pinched in his voice. “Gimme a break, Ling. I may be avaricious but I’m not a masochist.”

Ling punches the ground with the side of his fist. Though it should be solid stone, it fractures into another, smaller crater under the impact. As if he had a strength so much greater than what he does. His dream is mocking him. He can barely hold himself together, and yet it makes him seem so much more powerful than he feels. “That can’t be it! I told you, didn’t I? My heart is big enough for thirty of you, let alone one!”

Then, of all things, Greed chuckles. “Your avarice is as admirable as ever, but that’s not gonna cut it. I was created from a Philosopher’s Stone, remember? I’d need one to even exist, and unless you’ve got one hidden in this body of yours then no dice.”

Ling lifts his head suddenly, back on his hands and knees, as he looks up at Greed. “A Philosopher’s Stone?”

He still doesn’t turn to look at him. “Don’t be stupid. You’re not the type to put that soiled stone back in your body—”

For once, Ling is the one to chuckle. “You really don’t listen when I talk, do you?”

“Huh?”

“I said I would do whatever it takes to help my people. I accept all of the risks—!” 

A pulse of pain wracks his body, choking off his words before he finishes them. He coughs, but quickly realizes that it’s not just a cough as the taste of copper floods his mouth, splattering onto the ground in front of him. His eyes widen at the sight of it as he covers his mouth, more of it dripping over his palm.

“What—” He no sooner gets the word out than another throb goes through him, bringing him down to his elbows, his face accidentally landing in the pool of blood he just created. He screams, both because of the pain but also because of the surprise at the intensity of it. Why? Where did this come from?

The sound of a soft, metallic “ _tink_ ” lands in front of him. He has to pivot his cheek on the ground to even look, but his vision is swimming. Only a foot in front of him, laying on the edge of the crater he created a moment ago, is a delicate decorative pin, and the memory that comes along with it brings a new searing pain across his skull. He grips his head like it’s going to split down the middle if he doesn’t hold it together, screaming again. Maybe it is splitting. It’s being driven in two by a wedge of never-ending agony.

Then, without ceremony, there are points of relief. They come suddenly and randomly but he can feel them moving across his body without a pattern. He thrashes anyway, trying to exorcise himself of this suffering. His eyes sting with tears.

“C’mon, kid, keep it together!” Greed’s voice seems like it should hurt his ears, but it doesn’t. It’s echoing inside of his head. Or maybe it’s echoing before it even reaches his ears, he doesn’t know. It’s also closer than it was before, he thinks.

He spits up more blood but this time it floods his mouth instead. He almost panics at the thought of suffocation before turning his head to the side and choking it out onto the pavement instead. With what little strength he has he rolls himself onto his side—when did he get onto his back?—and slumps down on his shoulder. His sense of vertigo settles enough for him to realize he’s propped up on something, albeit awkwardly. He doesn’t care. His stomach is heaving again, and he grips at whatever it is he’s laying on.

“What the hell’s happening?” Greed asks, once his violent wrenching stops. Ling can’t stop his body from shaking, tiny convulsive shocks of quick pain that overlap too fast to monitor.

“Poison…” He coughs, trying so hard to not move. 

“That should be no big deal for that fancy-shmancy alkahestry of yours, right? So why are you coming apart at the seams?”

“Dunno…” He grips tighter at the cloth he’s taken ahold of, not even sure where it came from, as another tremor goes through him. “I think…my body…is dying…”

“You’re screwing with me,” Greed says, incredulous, but Ling flatters himself to think there’s a bit of scared disbelief in there. “If this is some dramatic ploy to get me to—”

“No ploy,” Ling breathes, stilted and haggard, but he somehow manages to laugh despite his lungs’ failure to operate properly. “What was it…you said? ‘I’m avaricious…but not a masochist…?’”

He rolls onto his back, something touching his arms to steady him. He’s already figured out what it is, though, which is why he isn’t surprised when he opens his eyes to find Greed immediately over him. His vision swims, coming together and separating. There are four Greeds, and none of them have a clear face. He reaches up to try to make them stop. He can tell by Greed’s size that he’s close enough to touch. He can tell by the angle that he’s laying on Greed’s lap.

Greed grabs his hand with such force that it’s almost a slap. Ling’s certain it would have fallen out of the air if he hadn’t closed his fingers around it, though Greed just lowers it down to his chest again and rests it there. 

“Idiot…” he murmurs. “Don’t strain yourself.”

Ling closes his eyes, giving up on trying to make a clear picture of Greed’s face for now. The spams are starting to die down, finally, and he just tries to focus on the memory of breathing.

When he opens his eyes again, he realizes that the courtyard in Amestris is gone. They’re just floating in a wide, black void. There’s no light, but somehow he can see Greed clear as day, like something is illuminating just the two of them. He doesn’t remember Greed moving, but when he looks at him he’s leaning back on his hand, looking away from him again. Ling can feel the weight of Greed’s other hand and arm resting over his chest. Is the hole gone? He doesn’t want to look.

“Hey, Greed,” he calls, his voice getting back only a little bit of its strength. Now that the pain has faded, he can feel the blood crusted on the edge of his mouth.

“Hm?” He thinks Greed starts to turn towards him, but his eyes still can’t pick up on such a delicate motion. He doesn’t face him again, though.

He coughs, tasting more blood but he’s sure it’s just from earlier. Nothing fresh. “Did you mean…what you said? That you’re just…a collection of my memories…?”

“Far as I can tell.” He chuckles. “You should know by now that I would’ve taken your body back in a heartbeat if there was any of me left in it.”

“Yeah, I…guess that’s true.”

“Sure as hell wouldn’t have gone out this way. Poison, kid, really? I thought you wanted to protect Xing. Wasn’t that the whole point of letting me have your body in the first place?”

“Are you lecturing me while I’m lying here _dying_?” He asks, frowning.

Greed, he can tell by the tone in his voice, is also frowning. “Are you telling me you’re dying? Or are you just giving up?”

The question surprises Ling into not responding. For a moment it just swirls in his head before turning to anger. “I am not giving up! You’re talking to the Emperor of Xing, dammit!”

Of course, the tirade is over before it began as a coughing fit wracks through his body. His stomach tightens and he thinks he might throw up again. But even as it fades out, he manages to rasp, “How dare you…”

Greed laughs. It’s another of those abrupt sounds that seems to cut through everything, even the inky blackness that they’re sitting in. It’s almost obnoxious in its timber and its tone, but at least it’s not arrogant. Ling can tell it’s not arrogant. If anything, he sounds relieved.

“That’s it! That’s the fire I’m looking for! Ah, I knew you wouldn’t disappoint.”

Ling opens his eyes, but almost the moment he does there’s a hand over them, blinding him. “Greed? What are you doing?” 

“Just stay here, Ling,” he says, and there’s something in the tone of his voice that makes Ling’s body go limp. He doesn’t mean it to, it just does, like he isn’t in control of it. Like it’s connected directly to Greed’s voice.

“What…are you…” He can feel Greed moving underneath him, but his eyelids just keep getting heavier. When the hand is pulled away he can barely keep his eyes open. “Don’t…Greed…I still need you…”

But all he can do is let his head lull to the side, watching Greed’s retreating back until his eyes won’t stay open anymore.

———

It’s a good thing that he steps up to the front because Ling’s waking world is a world of _pain._

The first thing he does is scream. 

Apparently that’s a really big shock to the people standing around him because they stop whatever the hell it is they’re doing to Ling’s body and murmur to themselves. They’re just a bunch of fuzzy shapes to him and most of them step back, away from him, but one doesn’t. One rushes closer.

“Emperor Ling Yao!” She cries. She puts hands on him but when he screams again she pulls them back. 

“Shit,” he hisses through his clenched jaw and focuses hard. “That’s a bitch…guess it’s good that I cut the kid’s pain receptors…”

“What?” The female voice over top of him is confused, but he forces his eyes to focus until a face comes into view. 

He chuckles, strained. “It’s…Mei Chang, right?”

“Huh? That voice…” Then things click into place and she looks up at the others. “Leave us, and summon Lan Fan immediately!”

“Listen…whatever you’re doing, it’s killing this body,” he says. He grits his teeth as he chokes up more blood, but at least he can’t feel it now.

“The alkahestry is making it worse? But how can that be? Are you sure?” She has too many questions for his brain. He can’t handle them all right now, clinging to consciousness the way he is. 

“Do I look like I have all the answers? I’m barely hanging on here— _ack_!” He turns his head to the side, gagging. 

“Ling!” He hears the doors thrown open and a voice he recognizes as Lan Fan. How could he not recognize it with how often he’s heard her call out that name in that same tone of voice? She comes running over, fast as she ever was. He can feel her hand on his, but only as a slight pressure, nothing more.

“Don’t touch him!” Mei Chang says, grabbing Lan Fan in some attempt to restrain her, at least a little.

It’s not really pain anymore, but a general weight of sensation. He knows that something should be there, but it isn’t. Still, he forces himself to talk through it. More than that, he forces himself to turn his head, looking at the two girls. Judging by the copper taste in his mouth, he can only bet that he looks a mess. His voice is even weaker than it was before. “I don’t have much left in this body, but I think I can use it to reverse whatever the poison is doing to him. That should let the alkahestry work its magic.”

Lan Fan throws herself against Mei Chang’s arms, but it’s clear that she’s not fighting as hard as she could. His darkening vision doesn’t hide the tears in her eyes and his fading consciousness doesn’t mask the pain in her voice. “But what if it doesn’t? What if you’re not strong enough?”

“Heh.” He grins, giving a thumbs up even if he can’t raise his arms from the bed. “Then at least I can keep him from feeling it.”

———

There’s something tickling across his forehead. He can feel it, but he doesn’t know what it is. He just knows that it’s bothering him, so he rolls onto his side instead and ignores it, goes back to sleep. A short while later—it _feels_ like a short while later—he’s aware of a discomfort in his shoulder that he hadn’t noticed when he rolled over.

After that, he notices how uncomfortably hot he is. His body is burning up under the blankets, but he doesn’t feel like he has the strength and focus to move. Being hot makes him think about his thirst, how dry and tacky his throat and mouth feel. All of these issues compound on each other, filling him with a need to move rather than a desire.

Slowly, reluctantly, he opens his eyes. The room is dark, save for the fire burning in the fire pit. It’s down to mostly its embers, though. It’s never very big, just enough to give the comfort of warmth while he falls asleep. Most of his warmth comes from the blankets piled on top of him anyway, and there’s a faint breeze teasing across his face.

He turns his head to look out of the window that’s open near his bed. He can see up into the sky from here, from this angle, at the blue stars just beyond the trees. All of the pink blossoms are gone, leaving just their branches behind, naked. 

The breeze across his face leaves him feeling chilled, though, and he doesn’t understand it until he realizes how damp he is. Judging by the heat, he’s probably been sweating profusely. He pushes himself upright with what seems like surprising ease. The blankets slide down from his chest and into his lap. There are bandages wrapped around his abdomen, probably holding some herbs and ointment there if he had to guess. 

Gradually, he moves so his feet are over the side of the bed and pushes himself so that he can stand up. His body doesn’t feel any different, so he’s surprised when he suddenly hits his knees. He yelps as he just drops to the floor without warning, bracing himself for the pain. It should be sharp, as he puts his hands up to try to protect himself, but it isn’t. He feels something in his elbows as they slam into the wood with his weight, but it’s a slight discomfort at worse. There’s another faint twinge in his right wrist.

Pushing himself onto his back, he looks at his hand, checking his wrist, but it looks alright. He makes a fist and rolls it. There’s no pain, but as he moves it he can see a slight awkwardness in the joint. He rubs at his eyes and tries to look again, but it’s still there despite the fact he doesn’t feel anything. Writing it off as still being halfway asleep, he gets back to his feet.

He falls back down to his knees twice on his way to the pitcher of water on the table, but he manages to get there. He doesn’t even bother pouring a glass, just tipping the pitcher on its side and drinking straight from it. He drinks all of it without pause.

He manages to drag himself over to the doorway leading to the courtyard, sliding it open. He leans on the wood heavily so he doesn’t break the paper doors by accident, panting. His body feels like it’s on fire, only a minute from bursting into flame, but as the cool air washes over him he’s given a sense of ease.

He lowers himself to sit down on the walkway. It quickly turns into laying down on the cool, wooden floor. He drifts back to sleep, breathing heavily through gritted teeth as his body trembles.

———

“But Clanswoman Fau was—”

“I know who attacked me, Lan Fan,” he says, gripping at his pencil. He can sit up now, with the help of some pillows, though his body still feels weak. He still gets dizzy when he moves too much, and his alkahests pay him regular visits, including Mei Chang, to flood his body with revitalizing chi. It helps, but the remnants of the poison still require regular sessions. His blood is slowly thinning it out.

“And I believe you, Emperor Ling Yao, but maybe it’s possible, in all the time you spent in your coma, that you’re remembering incorrectly.”

He rips a page out of the book he was sketching in and hands it to her, angrily. “Raid the Wu representative house. _Find_ Feng Wu. Find this pin. She won’t have put it far, not if she thinks it’s the one to kill me. She’ll want to keep a treasure to remember her kill by.”

Lan Fan takes the drawing, looking at it, and then bows her head. “Yes, my lord.”

His orders heeded and Lan Fan gone, he slumps back against his pillows, panting and sweating. The fevers come and go with an intensity that’s never ravaged his body before. The doctors say that he should take it easy, but there’s an itch in him that he can’t ignore.

The door opens long after Lan Fan has left him, but he doesn’t look away from the courtyard. 

“Emperor Ling Yao?”

The voice is the only reason he looks, finding Mei Chang and Alphonse standing there. They both seem relieved. Mei Chang runs over to take his hand in hers. “How are you feeling?”

He smiles, though he’s sure it’s lacking in sincerity. He doesn’t have the energy for it. “Much better, thanks to you, though I hope you both have been keeping it to yourselves.”

“Not a peep,” Alphonse says, stepping up next to the bed. Ling can still read the concern in his eyes. “But are you sure you’re alright? There’s nothing we can do to help?”

“I need my would-be assassin to think that I’m still in the coma,” he explains, shaking his head. “Feng Wu is smart. She’ll dispose of the evidence if she knows that I can clear Clanswoman Fau’s name.”

“You seem to know a lot about her,” Mei Chang says, frowning a little.

“Feng Wu was my most ardent would-be assassin before I ever inherited the throne,” he says, with some gravity. “The Wu and the Yao don’t even have a particularly intense rivalry, but she’s always come at me with more force than anyone else.”

“But you’re Emperor now,” Alphonse speaks up. “She had to know that this was treason, didn’t she?”

“I’m certain that she does,” he looks at the two of them. “It’s also just as likely that she doesn’t care. Her grandfather didn’t seem to mind openly questioning me in most of our conferences. I knew that there would be dissension in the leaders when I took over, but he’s the only one who’s been arguing all of my decrees.”

The room falls quiet and Ling looks over at the two when they don’t speak up. Their expressions are pinched. Strained. They want to say something but they don’t know where to begin. Mei Chang’s eyes drop, and he’s looking for something to say to alleviate the tension when she gasps.

“What happened to your hand!?” She cries, reaching over him for his other hand. He tries to pull it away and he’s sure that her fingers clasp around the bruise, but he only feels the faint pressure. A slight discomfort. The alkahestry sessions have also been helping to heal his wrist, but mostly he forgets to bring attention to it for healing. Mostly he forgets it’s even injured.

There’s an ugly, deep bruise on his right wrist. The moment Mei Chang puts her hand over it and realizes it, she moves it away, trying to cradle it. Her eyes fall on him, looking for damage done, looking to apologize for the intense pain she’s sure she’s cause him, but Ling just looks at his blankets. He curls his newly freed left hand in the bedspread and smiles.

“I fell getting out of bed,” he says. “It’s nothing, really—”

“Does this hurt?” Mei Chang asks, pressing gently on his wrist. Ever the alkahest, he isn’t surprised that she’s already jumped to trying to heal him. He can see her thumb pressing gently into the bruise. He can feel the faint discomfort.

“A little,” he says, which isn’t entirely dishonest. “Really, Mei Chang, it’s fine—”

“Here?” 

“Only a little, but—”

“More or less than before?” She’s insistent, frowning at him or at her task, he isn’t sure.

“It’s the same. I just need to have it bandaged, really. It’ll heal—"

She turns his hand gently in hers, testing the twist of his wrist gently, her fingers pressed softly into the bruise. The discomfort is steady, but it doesn’t throb or twinge or anything, but something happens that makes her eyes widen when she looks back up to him.

“Doesn’t that hurt, Emperor Ling Yao?”

He frowns, not liking the look on her face. “I told you, it hurts a little.”

“Mei Chang, what is it?” Alphonse asks, stepping forward, the concern evident in his voice. She looks over at him with something baffled, but perhaps a little pained.

“It’s dislocated,” she says, and Ling’s eyes widen. He doesn’t even register Mei Chang in front of him, though he hears her voice. “But…why isn’t he in any pain?”

———

Confined to his bed, Ling decrees to his immediate, trusted retainers that they’ll keep up the illusion he’s in his coma. He has Lan Fan and her nephew, another trusted retainer from the Fan family, use subterfuge to seek out Feng Wu.

The Xingese people know that an attempt was made on his life and he took very ill. They pretend they have no leads.

It’s custom not to divulge too much information from the palace. With such a delicate power structure in place, it isn’t safe to let too much knowledge seep out. One wrong step could lead to civil war. He knows that the Yao Clan, his clan, would not take an attempt on his life lightly. They felt relief when he was made Emperor; his future should have been guaranteed. To have that ripped away will incite rage.

It’s for their safety, to stay their angry hand, that he lies.

The ruse of his coma leaves space for hope. Hope for the Yao Clan, and for those who believe in him, that he will recover to rule again. But also hope for catching Feng Wu.

Because he knows, out there, she’s hoping that he’ll never wake up again. So long as she hopes that, they have the upper hand. So long as she doesn’t know the truth, Ling knows she won’t be far from Xing.

———

_He’s walking through Xing, through the Yao Clan lands, but things pass by in a blur. It’s almost like he’s moving too fast, but he’s just walking. Things are smudged in his peripheral, but he just keeps looking straight ahead. It doesn’t even occur to him to look to either side. His body knows where he’s going, but he doesn’t._

_He doesn’t pass by any people. Everything is quiet. It’s far too quiet, but not in an eerie way. It just makes him aware of the silence. An absence of sound more than a smothering of it, and he feels a pull in his chest. It threatens to drag him down, so he keeps walking._

_The more he walks, the quicker things pass by him. He knows that he isn’t moving any faster, but it’s like he’s gaining speed with each step. He traverses all of Xing. He cuts through the desert without a second thought. It blinks by him without the heat or the dryness touching him. He walks and he sees no one the whole way._

_He gains so much speed that he moves through solid objects. Or maybe he would have moved through them all along, but he hadn’t really tried. They don’t impact him. It doesn’t even occur to him that they could get in his way as he goes through trees and buildings and pillars. His pace is slow, but the world picks up speed around him._

_Then it stops, and he’s standing just inside the walls surrounding Central City’s military base. He can see the crater. The world smudges and smears all around him, like the world can’t bring itself into focus, but he stands for a moment. He takes a breath, but no air seems to fill his lungs, nor does he seem to need it. He keeps walking forward, trying to go to that spot, but every time he gets close he resets. He goes back to the spot where he’s just inside of the wall._

_He runs, but the loop just happens even faster. Just before he gets to the spot he wants to be at, he’s back at the wall…back at the wall….back at the wall…_

_He can’t get there._

_He wants to scream, but he can’t get up the energy. It bubbles and simmers angrily in his chest, all that frustration and rage and pain, but it won’t come out._

_So he walks up next to the spot, at the lip of the crater, right next to the place where Father ripped Greed out of his body, and he sits and looks out at the destruction._

_“What have you done, Greed?”_

———

“I told you, I feel fine!” He says, trying to sound as relaxed as possible, to one of his alkahests, as he moves to the edge of the bed. It’s clear they want to stop him, their hands hover in the air barely touching him, but they wouldn’t dare lay a hand on him. “This is my fifth session, and I can’t even feel the poison now. My body doesn’t feel weak at all.”

“Emperor Ling Yao, please—”

He puts his feet on the floor, satisfied that he can feel it under his feet, a little cool. He stands up and stays on his feet, which surprises him since he’s been confined to his bed for two weeks. It seems like his muscles should have atrophied by now, though a part of him knows that he’s only being dramatic. Maybe that has to do with the frantic thoughts running through his head since Mei Chang’s visit.

He walks over to his dresser to find a jacket to throw over his bandaged chest, not bothering to change out of the pants he was already wearing. He isn’t going far, just to his secluded courtyard. Away from the alkahests. Away from everyone.

“You aren’t well enough to be exerting yourself so hard,” one of them calls, following after him and standing behind him as he goes through his dresser. “There’s something very wrong with your body—”

“There is nothing wrong with my body!” This time he snaps. The cacophony in his head is making it hard to keep his cool. Hard to think straight. He needs fresh air. He needs to be away from this.

Pulling out a jacket, he throws it across his shoulders and heads for the sliding door at the far side of his room. He hops off of the walkway, feeling the grass beneath his bare feet, and walks towards the pathway. There are footsteps on wood behind him, but he doesn’t hear any of them stepping down into the grass itself. Good. He keeps going, heading towards the bridge.

For a moment he stops, though, suddenly overtaken with a coughing fit. It’s hard to get the air down, but it doesn’t hurt. Mostly it’s jarring, the lack of oxygen to his lungs makes his heartbeat pick up. Still, he doesn’t feel anything in his lungs. The crisp air should be refreshing, but it just seems like any other necessary function. There’s not even a scrape across his throat from the harshness of his cough. He cover his mouth when it’s clear that it’s not going to stop right away and he’s spitting up saliva, but he gets it back under control.

As he moves to wipe his hand on his pants he freezes, his heart jumping up into his throat, when he sees the red stain splattered across his palm.

The lightheadedness hits him and he wobbles, falling to his knees. The cries of his name from the startled alkahests behind him don’t quite cover up the sound of crunching gravel underneath him as he lands. There’s a dull pinch from his knees hitting the sharp stones, but that’s it.

 _When did I get on the gravel…?_ His vision swims, turning dark at the edges just as someone enters his line of sight. He pitches sideways, dizzy, and closes his eyes so he doesn’t get sick.

———

“Can you feel that?” The doctor asks, poking his left palm. Ling focuses on the bumps his feet make under the covers at the end of the bed.

“Yes,” he says, voice flat.

“And this?” He moves up his arm, to his forearm.

“Yes.” 

“This?” He prods his upper arm.

“Yes.”

The doctor gets up and moves to his other side, picking up his injured right wrist. It’s long since bandaged now, though the alkahestry is taking care of most of the damage. It’ll be healed after another two sessions, they tell him. The doctor presses on his wrist, hard. Ling can feel the pressure beyond his previous prods.

“Does this hurt?”

“No.” He doesn’t even feel the discomfort that he felt when Mei Chang told him it was dislocated. “I only feel the pressure.”

“No pain?”

“No pain.”

The doctor hums in grim consideration. Ling feels a pressure and a discomfort on his upper arm, something muted, though he can’t determine what it is until he looks.

“You—!” Lan Fan steps forward out of the shadows of the corner of his room, and he can hear the metallic scrape of her drawing a blade.

“Lan Fan, no!” He says, raising his other hand. “This is an examination! The doctor is only doing what he came here to do!”

“But—” She lowers her arm, and he can see the pain in her eyes. The barely contained rage. “Yes, my lord.”

“Did that hurt?” The doctor asks, as if he wasn’t almost attacked by one of the most efficient bodyguards in all of Xing. Ling looks over at him, then his arm, where he’s made a very small, thin laceration with his scalpel. There’s blood visible in the wound, but it’s not deep enough to bleed profusely.

He closes his eyes and grits his teeth, his brow knitting. “No. I only felt a little bit of discomfort. Like pressure on a bruise. I know what being cut with a blade feels like, I _know_ that pain…and that isn’t what it felt like at all.”

Another grim hum. The doctor puts an ointment over the small cut and then a bandage, sitting on the bed now so he can reach Ling’s chest.

“Lie back on the pillows for me,” he instructs, and Ling does, looking at the ceiling. Rampant confusion lays waste to his mind, charging over every coherent thought he’s ever had. The further the examination goes, the less in control he feels.

“Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” Ling says, feeling the doctor push on his side. “It’s just pressure.”

“Where is my hand?”

“On my side,” Ling says, then feels a wave of panic-illness go through him. His voice quiets, “You’re pushing on the place where I was poisoned, aren’t you?”

“The most heavily damaged part of your body,” the doctor agrees. “Your alkahests have been working hard to fix this part of you, but the cell death here is severe. You’ve only managed to recover about sixty percent of the tissue so far, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.” Ling almost chokes on the word, but not because of pain. He wishes it was from pain.

“Necrosis is a very painful method of death, Emperor Ling Yao,” he explains. “This part of your body should be screaming at you right now with how hard I’m pushing on it, and even the strongest painkillers would still leave you with a little bit of pain. You don’t feel anything but pressure, do you?”

“No.” This time he does choke on the word. His throat is closing up, he can feel it, but he doesn’t know why. The horrifying reality they’re discussing? His body’s reaction to a pain he can’t feel? He doesn’t know. It’s something hovering on the edge of panic that makes him explain further. “I don’t feel any pain at all there. Not even the discomfort I felt in my arms and legs.”

The pressure eases away. The doctor experiments further across his torso, and Ling has a sinking sensation that drops further and further in his stomach. One that he doesn’t want to have confirmed. He almost ends the examination early but his throat chokes off the words and his brain short circuits, like some part of him won’t let go of the need to know.

“Do you feel that?” The doctor asks.

“No.” He hates how tight his throat feels. “I don’t—I don’t feel anything. Where are you—?”

He sits up a little bit to look at where the doctor is touching him, and sees the dull edge of his scalpel pressed in the center of his chest. 

“ _Then why do you have that big hole in your aura?_ ”

He can’t feel it. He can’t feel it. He can’t feel it. He’s looking right at where the doctor is touching him, he can see the soft indent in his skin of the scalpel pushing down, but he _can’t feel it._ There may as well be nothing there.

_He gropes for his chest, trying to cover it, but his hand goes right through it. He can’t feel it. There’s nothing there to touch. Just a gaping, hollow hole that goes right through him._

Because he can’t feel the scratch in his throat, Ling doesn’t even realize that the horrified scream that cuts his examination short is coming from him.

———

Later, after he calms down, he’s laying on his side in bed and staring ahead at nothing. There’s a fire crackling, outlining his lump of his shadow on the wall, but it doesn’t cover the sound of two voices standing near the door. They’re trying to be quiet, but Ling can hear it.

“To the best of my knowledge,” he hears the doctor explaining to Lan Fan. “The necrosis may have caused some nerve damage. That doesn’t explain why his limbs are only indifferent and his abdomen is insensitive, though. Also it seems like the nerves in his chest are completely nonfunctioning.”

“Is that dangerous?” Lan Fan asks, and her voice is direct and calm. But he knows she’s not calm. He has to believe she’s not calm, because he’s used to her overreactions when it concerns his health. He has to believe she’s not calm, because he’s not calm. He’s just too tired to keep screaming, at least on the outside.

“It could be,” the doctor says in a tone that may as well replace his words with ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ “I doubt that he’s in any danger from his body shutting down, as his internal organs are all working fine and the alkahests haven’t reported any further disruption with his chi. The danger will come from the fact that he could be badly hurt or ill and he won’t realize it.”

“He won’t realize it?” Now she sounds a bit more concerned. He raises his bandaged hand and looks at it, clenching his jaw a little.

“Most people with this sort of diagnosis think that it’s a blessing they can’t feel pain at first, but it seems that he’s already realized the problems this will cause him.” A grim hum. He’s getting so tired of that sound. Ling covers the side of his head with his arm, as if that’ll help him to block it out, but his ears betray him. “Every child who bumps into something says ‘ _ow_ ,’ even if they aren’t badly hurt, because it signals to ourselves and others that there’s the _potential_ for damage which can then be addressed,” he explains, then pauses. “Emperor Ling Yao no longer has the nerve sensitivity to determine if he should even say ‘ _ow_ ’ in the first place.”

Ling turns his face into his pillow and wills himself to sleep.

“So he could be gravely hurt, and he wouldn’t even know it?” Lan Fan asks, as the horror dawns on her. He can hear it in her voice.

“Precisely. That’s probably why he strained himself that day I was contacted. He simply didn’t feel that his body wasn’t ready for the exertion he put on it. Until he learns how to monitor himself more carefully, he’s at great risk for doing irreparable damage without realizing it.”

He curls up tighter under the covers, pushing his arm down harder on his head. His movement in the bed seems to be noticed, because the next thing he hears is the doctor ushering Lan Fan out into the hallway so they can let him rest. Ling curls his fingers in the long hair along the back of his head, feeling the pull but not with any pain.

He murmurs into the air without uncurling himself. “What have you done to me, Greed?”

———

He’s forced into bedrest for the next two weeks, only permitted to move for small tasks. Anything that demands more exertion is left to the discretion of one of his team of alkahests. Slowly, the necrotic damage in his side starts to recover, in a manner of speaking.

Dead cells can’t be healed, no matter the amount of chi pushed into them. They’re dead by definition, and even alkahestry can’t push life into something that’s dead. Instead, it pushes energy through to the living cells around it, which spread to replace the dead cells. After every session they pull away more dead skin, dead tissue, away from his side. 

He’s told that the process is horrifically painful, and judging by what they pull off of his body, he can see why it would be. But he doesn’t flinch. He still doesn’t feel even the slightest discomfort. 

“That should be your final treatment,” Mei Chang tells him, sitting on the side of his bed as the other alkahests file out. Then, softer. “You still don’t feel any pain?”

“None,” Ling says, staring at the ceiling, his voice tight and flat. “And it doesn’t make any sense that my nerves would be damaged this severely, because the alkahestry should have fixed all of my pathways. It’s like my body’s been rewired to think that this is correct.”

“Em—”

“Well, at the very least,” Ling says, pushing himself to sit up. His voice changes, taking on something cheerful. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Mei Chang’s surprised expression. “I won’t have anyone yelling at me to stay in bed now.”

“You aren’t worried?”

“Worried?” He looks at her and laughs at her expression as he slouches forward a little, the laughter softening to a delicate smile. “I’m relieved. It’s been boring just lying in bed these past four weeks! I’m not the kind of person who wants to just lay around, though it’s been nice having food brought to me all the time.”

He rests a hand on his stomach, and Mei Chang seems to cheer up. “Oh! So you can still feel your hunger pains?”

“I’m not sure,” he answers, shaking his head. “Lan Fan has been making sure that I eat regularly and that I eat a lot, so I haven’t had the chance to find out.”

He's lying, of course. He disposed of all the food Lan Fan had brought him one day and managed to not eat for a full 24 hours. He hadn't felt a thing. No painful cramps, no pinching reminders of his empty stomach. Nothing. But he doesn't need to worry Mei with that, and he doesn't want to explain how frustrating it is to miss a feeling he's always hated.

She smiles and he can tell that she’s letting the relief take hold of her. Good. That’s what he wants. That's why he lies. “That sounds like Lan Fan.” She pauses, then rests her hand on his. He can feel the pressure, but not the temperature of her hand. “So, what now?”

He looks towards the open door that leads out to his courtyard, the weight of the question settling on him. 

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it, about the fact that he would inevitably be able to move again. He’s had four weeks with nothing else to think about except that. He’s had two weeks where he isn’t permitted to do anything but rest and think. The whole country thinks he’s in a coma, so even his political dealings can’t provide distraction.

He knows that he’ll have to learn how to manage this new, unfeeling body of his. He also knows that it won’t be easy with those signals missing. But his life has never been a particularly easy one, so it’s hard for him to feel pity for himself now. Eighteen years and there’s been only a few reprieves. Maybe he was due for another universe shattering moment.

“I’m going to train with Lan Fan,” he says. “It’s going to take some time, but I’m going to do whatever it takes to get used to this body.” 

He looks at his lap, curling his fingers into the blankets as if it will help him to keep ahold of his determination. An indignation burns in him, one that isn’t diplomatic but spiteful. An anger that comes from a dark, endless place. A rage that’s newly birthed from his hurt—the only hurt he’s been able to feel in the past four weeks: loneliness. An intense, powerful loneliness that no one around him can touch because it spreads from the point in his chest where he can no longer feel anything. 

His voice is low, and dark with barely contained fury. 

“And then I’m going to track down Feng Wu and bring her back to Xing myself.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to really sit down and edit this chapter, so it might have more mistakes than the others. Sorry about that and please feel free to let me know of anything you find!

_Two months later._

The settlements that Amestris has erected for the Ishvalans are remarkable. They helped to make sure that they had most amenities that they could need, though the harsh desert climate doesn’t allow for much in the way of produce. That’s what the trade routes between here and Amestris are for. They’ve already started expanding to Xing based on groundwork that he laid before the coma brought on by an assassination attempt.

It’s not uncommon, then, to see Xingese people traveling through the settlements built on the ruins of Xerxes. Merchants, mostly, though there are some people who come on good will or to help with further rebuilding. It’s not easy to build up a decimated society. Thankfully, the Amestrian military has made great strides and the Ishvalans are able to implement their own culture back into their day-to-day living now that they have a place to safely do so.

But the unforgiving desert sun makes loose clothing and head garb necessary. Ling wears a large, straw hat and a thin bit of cloth over his face, obscuring everything beneath his eyes. It provides ample shade and also gives him exactly the cover that he needs as he watches the people walk back and forth across the market place.

He doesn’t feel the heat.

_”Are we sure she didn’t go all the way to Ishval?” Lan Fan asks._

_“She wouldn’t have wanted to be that far from Xing,” Ling explains, looking into the fire they started as they camped out. “She’ll want to be able to get back to Xing as quickly as possible when news of my death spreads. It’ll be her best chance to vie for the throne again.”_

He’s starting to wonder if his time in Amestris, away from the hostility of Xing, really has dulled his senses. They haven’t even seen a glimpse of Feng Wu since they arrived. He still doubts that she would have gone all the way to Ishval, but she may have looped back to Xing. Three months is a long time for her to stay in hiding. Though she might want the satisfaction of killing him, he knows that she isn’t that patient.

Still, it was by Lan Fan’s suggestion that he sent ahead to Amestris and the Ishvalans to keep an eye out. If Feng Wu did go that far, then she would have been hidden anyway. He’s not sure he could give them sufficient information in a coded letter, but he hopes that his instincts are right and she didn’t make it that far.

 _Still, two months…_ Might she have snuck back to try to kill him while he’s in his coma? It’s possible, but he doubled the security on his palace before he left. Being away from Xing makes him anxious.

Of course, the anxiety comes from elsewhere, too.

“What kind of tea is this?” Asks a woman in front of him, politely, pointing at the wares he has set out in front of him. He recognizes her voice immediately, looking up to see Lan Fan.

“Chai!” He replies, cheerfully. “It’s from the Northernmost region of Xing!”

“Oh, North?” 

Lan Fan can’t disguise herself as an Ishvalan, but she wears similar garb to what he is to mask her face. It’s easy to tell she’s Xingese, but the Ishvalans in the settlement leave them well enough alone. The fact that she’s questioning the location of the item in question, though, draws his attention.

“I thought Chai was from the furthest Eastern reaches of Xing?”

_Far east?_

“Well, we do have some crops out that way, but this particular Chai is grown in the Northern area. It seems to be pretty popular here, especially because it has a natural cooling quality. I think a few establishments carry it.”

“Does the eatery four blocks from here have it?”

“I’m not sure! Unfortunately I don’t get to spend too much time in Ishval. I’m mostly running the trade routes.”

“I see. Well maybe I’ll try it at the eatery later to see if I like it.”

“It’s probably quite refreshing after the sun sets!” He agrees, cheerfully. “Wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes, certainly,” she nods, then pretends to notice something off to the side. “Oh! I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll check back tomorrow! Make sure you don’t sit for too long out here in the sun like this!” 

“I’ll be here! Hey, thanks for your concern!”

Ling takes the note and uncrosses his legs, stretching them out to the corners of his sales mat. There are no pins and needles, no pinching, but as the blood starts to come back to them he does feel a faint soreness. Ah, so they were going numb. He takes the time to rub some life back into his calves.

———

It’s been three months since he’s had a dream about Greed.

He dreams of the places he used to see him. He looks to the spots in the sky where he used to hover. He stands at the lip of the crater in Amestris. But Greed is nowhere.

In three years since the fight against Father and Greed has never been _nowhere._ In fact, most of his dreams in that time had Greed in them. He wasn’t always the main focus, but he was at least a passing bystander on a street. He was usually somewhere, even when Ling wasn’t looking for him.

But he hasn’t had his reoccurring dream since the attempt on his life. He hasn’t seen Greed’s face pass by in a crowd. He hasn’t even seen a crowd.

He hasn’t seen the tunnel of Xerxian souls, not even as a distant pinpoint of black in the Xingese sky. He hasn’t heard his voice, not even a whisper. In fact, most of his dreams are filled with absolute silence. It’s as if his mind decided to put a vacuum there. Sometimes it’s so quiet that he wakes up fearing he may have lost his sense of hearing in addition to his ability to feel pain.

But inevitably he always hears himself gasp as he jars upright from his bedroll. He hears Lan Fan as she asks him what’s wrong. He hears his voice as he reassures her that it’s nothing. 

She doesn’t look like she believes him.

He doesn’t believe himself, either.

———

The eatery four blocks from the market is a quiet establishment, especially after dark. It doesn’t look like it stays open too late into the night, likely not able to generate too much business in these stages of rebuilding while the economy gets back on its feet, but that doesn’t deter whoever owns it. There’s light seeping out from the open window in the front, where clearly people are able to come pick up food during the day. It’s still open now, but there’s a wooden hatch that seems like it can be pulled down and locked when they close up shop.

He and Lan Fan aren’t about to start a fight in someone’s establishment, which means they need to monitor the place. Of course, that’s not easy with someone like Feng Wu, who can sense them. If two particular chi energies stay outside for too long, she’ll be able to pick up on it. She has no reason to suspect that anyone would be after her, not when she framed Clansman Fau, but Ling knows her games.

He also knows that he should be cool and collected. He knows that he must keep a level, focused head, but being so close to Feng Wu…it draws out an ichor from the wounds she’s carved into him. The rage that he felt that day in his chambers, the day he declared to Mei Chang that he would be the one to hunt her down, comes pouring back into him. He’s been an empty vessel these past three months and now he’s being filled with all the scalding hate he felt back then.

His heartbeat pounds in his chest and his throat feels tight. There’s a stimulus buried somewhere deep in him, he knows it, but he can’t hope to understand it when it’s outside of his ability to feel. All he’s left with is what it does to his body. The sudden rush of blood makes his head spin, but it’s not the kind he had when he was recovering. This is different. It’s something he can control.

They find a vantage point outside of a normal range for sensing chi, one that lets them keep an eye on the building. It’s not ideal—Ling wants to be able to react quickly—but this is Lan Fan’s area of expertise. He has to trust her judgment when his own threatens to be so badly skewed.

“We’ll lure her to the ruins on the Eastern side of town,” she explains, already knowing that they want to avoid dragging any Ishvalan lives into this. “That’ll give us a wide range of places to fight without risking anyone else.”

“Good,” he agrees, keeping a sharp eye on the eatery. He stands with his arms crossed, the air around them cooling. He can feel cool temperatures, but not hot ones, though his body sweats despite that.

They linger in silence as time ticks on. His head levels out a little bit and he calms his pulse. “Hey, Lan Fan.”

“My lord?”

“You haven’t—“ He starts, and then stops. He’s wanted to ask this so many times, though something holds him back each time. The faint hold he has on Greed’s voice seems like it’s slipping every day he goes without hearing him. But he can still hear him telling him that he’s only a collection of memories. He can hear his own voice, pained and betrayed, reminding Greed that he doesn’t—didn’t—believe in lying. 

“My lord?”

He curls his fingers into the sleeves of his jacket and stays focused straight ahead. “Nevermind. It’s nothing.”

———

She remembers the look on his face.

It’s strange, how they have the same face and yet they’re completely different at the same time. It should be Ling’s face. She knows Ling’s face. But Greed manages to shift it. It’s clear that it’s not Ling when Greed is in control. She doesn’t know how he does it. She doesn’t want to.

But she remembers his face as Mei Chang prepares for more alkahestry. He’s about to pass out but, before he does, he finds some strength.

“Lan Fan—“ She turns back to him, and she holds no hatred for Greed. Not when he saved Ling’s life that day. Not when he’s saving Ling’s life now. She thinks, looking back on herself, when the panic has settled and the terror has passed, that she would still listen to Greed. She would still heed his orders, so long as they had Ling’s best interest in heart.

He has Ling’s best interest in heart now, as he looks at her.

“Whatever you do—“ He chokes. “If he survives this…don’t tell him what happened here.”

“What?” She’s surprised. Genuinely surprised. Because what she knows of Greed, he should want that glory. He should want the nobility of dying protecting Ling, if he even can. Her body burns to do something, anything, to help him. Anything to save Ling.

Greed is still grinning. Aside from the occasional pained grimaces, she’s not sure he’s ever stopped. “I’ve got him thinking I’m just a bunch of memories…I don’t want you guys…screwing it up. He’ll be…extra annoying…if he finds out I lied…again…”

“But, you—Greed?” His body—Ling’s body—suddenly goes limp against the bedspread. “Greed? Greed!”

But he’s already gone.

———

“There she is,” Ling says. Though Lan Fan was hardly idle—and hasn’t been idle for the month they’ve been in the ruins—he can still feel her coil next to him. “Are you ready, Lan Fan?”

“Yes, my lord.”

She doesn’t even need the command before she’s taking off in Feng Wu’s direction, leaving him free to head towards the ruins.

A week ago, when the search was looking fruitless, Lan Fan started a rumor that the Emperor—that he—had died. There was great risk involved, because if Feng Wu wasn’t in this settlement then there was a good chance that the information would spread ahead of their ability to track her. Xingese traders were always moving on to Ishval, and such pressing news would have been something they wanted to make sure their other citizens knew.

If Feng Wu was here, then it would draw her out to head for Xing. But if she was in Ishval, there was every chance they would have missed her as she made a beeline for Xing.

Though the rumors have been circulating for a week. He thought that Feng Wu would have cleared out of the settlements as fast as possible, but he realizes now that she didn’t want to seem too eager. Her disappearance from Xing around the time of the attempt would have been noted if she returned promptly after his supposed death. She was buying some time, making it look like the two were unrelated. If she returned too soon, she would give away her sadistic, power-hungry nature. If she returned later, then she would seem only like a citizen of Xing who was ready to return home.

He knows that it was a gambit, but she was playing it too close to the chest to do anything else. She’d managed to elude them, even in a settlement this small, all this time.

Well, not anymore.

———

Because Ling was not born unable to feel pain, some knee-jerk reactions are still built into his body. He may no longer say ‘ouch,’ but he does know to bring his arm up to shield his face and eyes when Lan Fan tries to kick dust at him. He pays attention to her movement, but Lan Fan is quick. Her chi has always been hard to track. It’s part of what makes her such a good bodyguard. He manages to throw himself backwards just before her foot comes crashing into his chest. Though he feels vibration from the impact, he doesn’t feel the pain of slamming into the ground and he flips himself up after she’s landed on the other side of him. This time he goes on the offensive, getting into close range.

They exchange blows, only ducking their heads when necessary. He tries to keep an eye on her fists, but she’s fast and he’s not sure that he catches them every time. He can feel the slight ache when she hits him on the arms, but her body shots barely register. The adrenaline carries most of the sensation away before he can follow it.

“You’re losing track and it’s distracting you,” Lan Fan says, surprising him enough that when she turns her hand and punches straight in the slim crack between his raised arms, it actually lands. 

He manages to catch himself, to keep from losing his balance, but slides backwards across the dirt and flails a little. She’s on him in an instant, so he jumps backwards, out of range, before she can hit him this time. Her automail fist hits the dirt instead, digging a small crater into the ground.

The soreness in his arms is already starting to fade with the adrenaline. Before he knows it, he’s back to not feeling any pain. He shifts his stance and raises his hand, gesturing for Lan Fan to come at him again.

She studies him for a moment, then comes in hard.

———

He keeps pace with them as best as he can, but also maintains his distance. At times it’s hard to keep them in his vision, buildings get in the way, but Lan Fan brings the fight to the roof. Feng Wu has her on the defensive. That was part of the plan, to let her think that she had the upper hand to lure her to their fighting grounds, but Ling can tell by looking that it’s not totally a feint on Lan Fan’s part.

He hasn’t fought Feng Wu in some time, and there’s no telling how much she’s pursued her training. He told Lan Fan all that he could about her, and he can only hope that it’s enough to draw her out and get her to where she needs to be. 

He runs ahead, though only to keep himself out of sight of Feng Wu and to be ready when she and Lan Fan get to the ruins. He has to trust that they’ll get there. He has nothing if they don’t, and he knows that Feng Wu won’t let Lan Fan walk away with her life. If they don’t make it here, he’ll have lost both Lan Fan and his chance at catching Feng Wu.

An explosion resounds back towards the settlement. It’s not big, but when he turns after touching base on the broken stone he can see a distant cloud of dust rising up between the houses. It sets his teeth on edge.

“Lan Fan…c’mon…”

But he knows better than to doubt Lan Fan’s abilities. It’s not just a matter of him trusting her to complete her task, it’s also an unshakable faith in her skill. She’s only grown since Amestris. Just as he doesn’t know what Feng Wu is capable of, he doesn’t know what Lan Fan is capable of now, either.

Two figures emerge from the dust cloud, only a few hundred yards from the edge of the ruins. He jumps off of the high point he was on so that he can hide behind one of the pillars, only peeking out to have a last glimpse before the two of them land in the circle of broken Xerxian stone.

He doesn’t hesitate, lunging forward to drive his elbow between her shoulders, trying to take her down. She’s clearly surprised, and he thinks he knocks the wind out of her, but when she hits the ground she rolls onto her back and throws her heel up towards his face. It catches him on the chin, knocking him backwards. He can feel his teeth knock together, but he kept his jaw clenched to keep from biting his own tongue in half. He wouldn’t have been able to feel it if he did.

Lan Fan lunges after her, not hesitating, and Ling follows suit. Together they make use of the terrain, and with a single call of her name Lan Fan knows to branch off and try to find a point to flank her. It’s their best shot.

Feng Wu wields two bladed tonfa and uses them with mastery. Though Lan Fan poses just as much of a threat as Ling, he was right to suspect that her attentions would be on him. He can only hope that it gives Lan Fan the opening she needs to turn the tide in their favor. The refresher course that came with training to get used to his new body probably won’t cut it, and it’s hard to use his reflexes to their fullest when his sense of pain is so dulled.

They touch down in another part of the ruins, a huge stone slab lining the western side, and Feng Wu brings it in for close combat. Ling aims for her body, trying to bring down her stamina with hard and quick blows. For every one he lands, she dodges three more. He can tell that her tonfa are cutting his arms and legs by the slices that appear in the material.

This is the first time he’s really gotten a look at her face. She looks completely different from Clansman Fau. The tenth in line, she’s only a year older than him. Her hair is still cut short and kept away from her face. She once told him she never wanted anything to get in the way of seeing who she was killing. Before the elixir challenge was issued, she’d killed five of the other heirs. Even after it was given, she had the idea of killing all forty-nine of them and being the last remaining heir to claim the throne.

He left Amestris before he found out how many more she eliminated from her path.

The blade of his dao catches on her tonfa. “I knew it was too good to be true, that my poison was still eating away at your body back in Xing.”

He pushes her back, though she doesn’t relent in her pressure. He grits his teeth, grunting, “Did you? It was the rumor that I died that got you to drop your guard. Clearly you were hoping it happened!”

That seems to annoy her, as she jumps backwards and puts some space between them. Ling adds some space, but doesn’t hesitate to rush in again. If he gives her time to collect herself again, then what progress he’s made will be lost. 

She tries to slow him down by hurling throwing knives in his direction, but they’re easy enough to dodge. He brings his sword to bare, clashing against her. He tries to keep her other tonfa in view and barely manages to dodge backwards to avoid an uppercut aimed for his face, the blade nicking his cheek and slicing a line up. He can only feel the slight tug of the blade in his skin, but nothing else.

“My lord!” He has to let go of his blade to make some distance, but he jumps backwards at the sound of Lan Fan’s voice. He’s out of Feng Wu’s space just as the sand around her erupts with small explosions from grenades embedded in the ground.

Lan Fan lands next to him as he coughs, tasting copper on his tongue. He wipes it from the corners of his mouth, but it doesn’t stop Lan Fan from noticing. “What? When did she—”

“Don’t take your eyes off her, Lan Fan—” A shape erupts from the darkness, and he sees Lan Fan bring her arms up just in time to cushion the blow as Feng Wu’s feet slam into her. “Lan Fan!”

“Don’t take your eyes off the prize!” She practically snarls, and grabs his collar. Ling turns just in time to see the glint of moonlight across his own sword before it sinks into his body. He’s already mid-reaction, turning to jam his palm into her face. He gets her in the cheek as she twists around him, using his momentum to flip him onto his back. He can feel the sword move in his abdomen, jolted out a little ways by its impact with the sand.

He chokes on the blood in his throat, but his body pulses with adrenaline that drives him to move. When he looks up, Lan Fan is already attacking Feng Wu again with a renewed rage. He pulls the sword out, shrugging off the loose jacket he was wearing, and fastens it tightly around the wound. It’ll buy him time, but he knows that it’s not much.

There’s the sound of a sharp _crack!_ as he gets closer and Lan Fan’s automail arm slams into Feng Wu’s jaw. She spins around, clearly thrown off balance, and Ling lunges his sword forward so her own momentum throws her shoulder into the tip of his blade. Human bodies aren’t easy to pierce, so he gives it another shove, until Feng Wu screams. He shoves until she falls backwards, hitting the sand, and he crouches over her.

Ling chokes again, spitting up blood that splatters on Feng Wu’s face, but his expression doesn’t falter. That only seems to widen her smile.

“Well,” she says. “That’s pretty impressive. It’s like you can’t feel the pain at all…but your body is still human and can only take so much damage. So I’d say I’m still winning.”

Clapping her hands together, he’s not fast enough to catch her hand before it touches the ground beside her. “ _What!?_ ”

He looks away from the circle as it illuminates, twisting his head towards the huge stone slab. The one that was behind him when she threw her knives. She was drawing the alkahestry circle with her feet while Lan Fan hit her.

“Lan Fan, look out!”

The blast destroys the slab, blowing chunks of stone outward across their battlefield. He hears Lan Fan’s surprised shout just as a chunk hits him in the head, knocking him off of Feng Wu. He rolls a few feet with the impact as a few others hit the side of his body mid-fall. Even without the pain, his ears ring and his brain rattles in his skull, dazed. He tries to bring the world back into focus and sees Lan Fan lying a few yards away, already stirring. 

He gets his arm under him and starts pushing himself up from the sand. Something hits him in the chest, knocking him another few feet, and this time he lands on his back. He chokes up more blood onto the ground before Feng Wu’s foot collides with the side of his face. His head snaps to the opposite side.

“I’m not the chatty type, Ling,” she says, though she sounds far away. “So I’ll make this quick.”

He blinks at her slowly, his head swimming. She’s coming in and out of focus, but he can still see his sword in her hand. She steps onto his wrists, planting her weight, and he pulls on instinct, trying to get them loose.

“I do want to thank you, though,” she says, swinging the sword down at his throat. “It’s been much more satisfying killing you in _person_!”

He hears Lan Fan scream his name.

———

“ _You’re going to like Xing._ ”

“Huh?”

They’re at the Rockbell house, recuperating. Ling can see and hear through his body, though he can’t control it. He doesn’t mind. He doesn’t feel hungry when he’s in here, and he’s used to the swirling souls around him. He’s been used to them for a while, actually. His resolve is unshakeable. 

“ _Xing, my country,_ ” Ling says, talking to the face of Greed’s Ultimate Shield. “ _You’re going to like it!_ ”

Greed chuckles in the real world, talking back to him aloud. “Oh, yeah? What makes you say that?”

“ _It’s way bigger than Amestris, for one,_ ” Ling explains, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back. There’s nothing to really lean back against, but if he imagines himself leaning back on something then it’s like there’s something there to lean on. Space is malleable by his whims. “ _And you and I will be ruling it, for another._ ”

That makes Greed laugh, which isn’t what Ling’s expecting, so he looks up at the hovering face in front of him.

“Is that it? I already told you: Xing isn’t enough to satisfy me. It’s the whole world or nothing.”

Ling frowns. “ _Well, yeah, but you didn’t let me get to the best part!_ ”

Greed sounds like he’s humoring him just so he can mock him for whatever it is he says. “Okay, kid, what’s the best part?”

Ling grins, and he knows that Greed can see it or feel it or some equivalent because Ling can feel it when Greed does things like that. “ _You’ll get to meet my whole family!_ ” 

“Your—what?”

“ _The Yao Clan! There’s over 500,000 of us,_ ” Ling says, sitting forward and crossing his arms and legs. He nods definitively. “ _They’ll be eager to meet you. Since you’re in my body now, you’re going to have a lot of friends and family to get acquainted with in Xing._ ”

Greed’s quiet for a moment, a long moment, before he asks with a thread of hesitation tangled around his words. “Don’t you think they’ll be sorta pissed I’ve taken over your body?”

Ling considers it, tapping his cheek. “ _They might think it’s weird at first, but I think they’ll understand the situation once I explain it to them._ ”

He feels something light and yet endless go through Greed, a ripple through all the souls swirling around him. He swears their swirling slows down, like a river current tamed by a dam. The Ultimate Shield doesn’t really make expressions, so he usually has to go by Greed’s voice, but this time he feels something, the same way he can feel his trepidation in battle. The same way he felt his agony when he killed Bido. His rage when he fought Wrath. His shock and his yearning when Ed offered to team up with him, bringing them here.

This ripple feels more like that last one, and Ling knows better than to call him out on it, though he still notes it. He notes everything he’s learned about the depths of Greed’s soul. That’s why he knows that the 500,000 members of the Yao Clan are, indeed, the ‘best part’ of Xing.

“500,000 Ling Yaos, huh?” Then he laughs, like he’s trying to put pavement over the pond that rippled with his emotion, as if that would erase the fact that Ling felt it. “Sounds annoying as hell!”

———

The tip of the sword snaps as it comes in contact with his neck, flying some ways away and hitting the sand. 

“What!?” She snarls, but his body curls up, wrapping his legs around her waist, and dragging her backwards until her head slams into the sand, her body weight on top of it.

The sound of alchemic energy crackles and charges the air, lighting up his abdomen in red as he reverse somersaults back to his feet, staying in a crouch. He watches the little brat kick and push, far less graceful than she was on her feet, trying and succeeding in getting her head out of the sand and shaking the grains free. She rolls to her side, gripping the arm that held the sword a moment ago.

He rolls his head, wiping the blood away from his mouth and shedding the loose jacket that a desert breeze started to whip up. Dramatic, but annoying. He laughs when he notices her holding her arm to her side, “Not so great slamming a sword at full force into my Ultimate Shield, is it? I bet your arm’s really feeling it!”

“What did you just do?” She practically growls. “How is your head still attached?”

He pushes himself to his feet, the last of the alchemic energy sparking from the wounds as they seal up across his body. “Sorry,” he drawls, rubbing the back of his neck. “The prince needed a little break. You really took a lot out of him. I’m kind of impressed.”

“Your voice…” She narrows her eyes at him as he blows some blood out of his nose. “You’re not Ling Yao, are you?”

“Bingo! You win the prize! A first class trip to hell, courtesy of yours truly. Though I really do hate to fight a woman, I think I can make an exception.” He raises a hand, curling it into a claw as the skin solidifies to hardened carbon from his fingertips all the way up his arm. He smirks, flexing his fingers and hearing the sweet, sweet tremor of metal. “You’re dealing with Greed now.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter might not come out on Thursday, but I'm really going to try! It's just an epilogue but I'm really struggling to get it where I want it. x__x
> 
> Thank you all so much for taking the time to write such thoughtful and kind reviews. I really appreciate it! A special thanks to puppehgal in particular, for all their help with little details that I missed and teaching me what Ling's sword is really called! You've been a huge help, and I can't thank you enough! GREED VS WRATH FIGHTS ARE THE BEST.

He’s falling through a blue sky. He’s falling so fast that the rush of wind pins his arms to his sides and steals the air from his lungs. He wants to open his eyes, wants to see where he’s falling, but he knows he can’t. The air will whip all the moisture from them and he thinks, for a terrifying moment, about them drying up in his skull. He thinks about the sting. He doesn’t even know if he’s falling through a blue sky, but this sensation is one that he only remembers from falling in his dreams. The sky in his dreams is always blue.

He’s been falling forever. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t falling, hurtling headfirst into a beautiful but vast endlessness. It goes beyond his ability to grasp, to contain, and thus he’s been swallowed up in it, in this gaping blue avarice of his.

“ _Do you intend to remain alone?_ ”

The power of being emperor. Protection for Xing. Protection for his clan. Protection for his friends. Growth of the empire. Prosperity for his people. An end to the bloodshed of heirs. A sound unification for Xing. 

Every thought digs the depth of this sky around him, makes it deeper, gives him more room to fall; he can’t stop thinking them. He can’t stop the way they rush to the surface the way water rushes through a broken dam. He wants too much. He can’t block it out.

He wants to bring Feng Wu to justice.

He wants to make her pay for breaking him in ways he can never let anyone see, in ways he can't even explain.

He wants everything, even if he doesn’t mean to. Even if the layers and layers of desire run so far through him that he can no longer distinguish them. 

He wants to regain the feeling in his body.

“ _Do you intend to remain alone?_ ”

He doesn’t want to be alone…but he’s not sure now if he knows any other way to be. It carves the word ‘need’ so deep into his body that he can’t ignore the throbbing from the wounds, reminding him of how strong they are. Even if his broken body can feel nothing else for the rest of his life, he knows he’ll always feel that.

The need not to be alone tightens in him like hunger. It parches his throat like thirst. It strangles his lungs like suffocation. It’s all the parts of him that he doesn’t want anyone to know, a weakness he has to hide. A weakness he thought Feng Wu was manipulating in that garden. A weakness that even now brings about his demise, too busy trying to shield his vulnerable point that he left his side open for her venom.

“ _Do you intend to remain alone?_ ”

The question is in the wind that cuts through him as he falls, every syllable rendering flesh in brutal interrogation. He wants to scream, but he doesn’t have the air for it.

“Do you _want_ to be alone?”

He nearly chokes on oxygen he doesn’t have, and, despite knowing that he’s doomed, he opens his eyes. 

Greed looks so casual while he falls, like the wind doesn’t even touch him. It’s irrelevant that they’re diving and swirling headfirst into an infinite sky: he’s unfazed. He even has his arms crossed like he’s bored.

“What…?” The whispers have stopped. The wind itself has stopped batting him so violently, though he can still feel it around him.

“Do you _want_ to be alone?” He asks again, frowning at him. “It’s a simple question.”

“I—”

“You know, in all the time I knew you,” Greed continues, closing his eyes and waving his hand in that conversational but almost dismissive way he always has. “You spent a lot of time talking about wanting to be emperor and save Xing and blah blah blah. But now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I don’t remember you doing a lot of talking about the nitty, gritty _greedy_ stuff. The selfish stuff. And the way I see it, that’s not really fair, seeing as I told you what I wanted.”

He chuckles and continues. “Now, don’t get me wrong, the noble stuff is all pretty great. Way beyond a reasonable scope of desire, just like I like it, and you’ve got the stomach to match it.”

Greed looks at him and Ling thinks his eyes could cut stone. Greed’s gaze slices through his deadened nerves and it’s the first thing he’s felt across the skin of his chest in months. “But what do _you_ want? What does Ling, not Prince Ling Yao, really want?”

As if gravity weren’t already twisted in this place, dragging him headfirst into the sky, he can feel it now in Greed’s words. Innately he knows. He knows if he gives the wrong answer—and there _is_ a wrong answer—then everything will slip away. He knows he has one chance, here and now, and once it’s gone it will never come back.

His eyes sting from more than just the wind, and pain blossoms across his chest. In spite of gravity, in spite of the wind, the indignant tears burn tracks down his cheeks.

“I—” The word chokes in his tight throat but he pushes through it. With all the rage of a sobbing child, reduced to hiccups from the ferocity of his tears, he screams. “ _I want you to come back!_ ”

The wind around them turns to a breeze, as if the power of his words changed the currents, and he can feel himself being slowed. He’s gently lowered until his feet touch solid ground. He’s surprised enough that he lifts his face from where he was rubbing his eyes, though the tears still come. He’s standing on a lake of crystal, the blue sky above him fading into a rapid red sunset.

“That’s more like it,” Greed says, and Ling looks at him. He watches Greed offer his hand. “C’mon, Ling.”

He runs, cracks spreading through the crystal behind him like breaking ice. He doesn’t care. He runs as hard as his body will let him, and then he runs harder. Until he can put his hand in Greed’s. He doesn’t know if he throws himself into Greed, or if Greed pulls him so hard that he crashes into him, but it doesn’t matter.

And he feels Greed’s arms around his chest.

And he feels Greed’s head in the cradle of his arms.

They tumble backwards, through the cracked surface of the crystal lake, and fall together into deep, temperate waters that the sunset illuminates red.

And neither of them needs to breathe.

———

“I might’ve gone easier on you,” Greed explains. “But see, I have this little pet peeve where I get _really pissed off_ when people touch what’s mine.”

Ducking low, he lunges himself into a run, swinging his leg up at the side of her head once she’s in range. She braces, catching him on her arm, but it’s clear she’s not expecting the unforgiving carbon of his shield. She goes flying, sliding across the ground as she continues careening towards one of the surrounding stones. She manages to recover before she hits it, but her balance is still off.

He lunges to hit her with his bladed fingers but she deflects it with her tonfa, sparks flying as the metal grinds together. Closing his hand around her blade at about the halfway point, he squeezes until it bends under his grip. He raises his other hand up to catch her throat, but she abandons the tonfa to jump backwards and out of his reach. He squeezes until it snaps in half under the pressure, straightening up.

He can’t stop grinning. He doesn’t know what’s come over him. “Ah! Fits like a glove.”

“What the hell _are_ you?” She asks, and the previous savage snarl is gone. She’s smart. She keeps her head under the new circumstances.

“Now you’re asking the right questions,” Greed answers, tapping his temple. “I’m a homunculus, and I’ve really got to thank you. Without your poison, I probably never would have been able to get control of this body again and I was really starting to miss the feeling of fresh air on my face.”

He rushes her again, slamming his palm into her braced arms and sending her backwards.

“Lan Fan!”

The little ninja girl flies up from the ruins behind him, landing and running wide to slam her elbow into Feng Wu’s arm. There’s a muted scream as the bladed tip of her automail cuts into Feng Wu’s arm, forcing her to drop the other tonfa before she can collect herself again. Greed rushes past it on his way to her, hearing a crack as Lan Fan’s knee hits the side of Feng Wu’s head. It sends her right into his hand, where he grips her throat and drags her with him so he can slam her into an erect slab sticking out from the sand.

She chokes up blood, fingers gripping at his wrist and twisting. Her grip is hard, but he embeds his fingers deeper into the stone to the point it flakes away like dead skin. He clamps tighter, until her struggles start to weaken against her will. The life starts to evaporate from her eyes.

“No!” Lan Fan comes up beside him, putting her hand on his elbow. “She needs to face a trial back in Xing! If we return with a dead body then we have nothing to clear Clanswoman Fau’s name!”

Greed loosens his hand, though only a little. Feng Wu pulls in air with a strangled, downright painful sound. He looks at Lan Fan, blinking slowly. “Huh?”

“We need to take her—”

“No, no,” he waves his other hand, the free one. “I get that part. It’s the part where you’re expecting her to confess that I don’t get.”

Lan Fan frowns. “That’s not up to you to decide.”

“And hello to you, too, Lan Fan. But seeing as I’m the one with my hand around her throat, I think it _is_ up to me to decide—”

“The entire Wu Clan could incite riots and sieges on the palace,” she says, her expression hard. “You’ll be putting Ling in danger.”

He frowns at the unpleasant weight of her words. He and Ling are a pretty good team, and he thinks he’s more durable than she’s giving him credit for, but Ling told him once that the Yao Clan was 500,000 strong. Who knows how big the Wu Clan is? Well, okay, Ling and Lan Fan probably know, but he’s not going to _ask_. Besides, he doesn’t think she’d look so serious if they were small.

He pulls his hand back and lets Feng Wu collapse to the sand, sighing as he retracts his Ultimate Shield. He raises both of his hands in defeat. “Alright, alright. We’ll do things your way.”

She nods definitively and steps forward to start tying Feng Wu up with the length of rope she has on her. But it doesn’t stop her from asking the obvious question, “Is Ling—”

“Napping,” Greed replies, crossing his arms and shifting his weight to one foot. “He’s doing fine, just tired out. But more importantly, where’s the ‘Hi, Greed! I’m so glad you’re not dead!’ I was expecting?”

Lan Fan doesn’t answer him, and for a while there’s just the quiet sounds of her restraining Feng Wu’s unconscious body. He murmurs ‘rude’ under his breath, but that doesn’t get her attention either. Eventually Greed looks at her, chewing at the inside of his cheek. “Uh…thanks.”

“Thanks?” She looks up at him as she stands, finishing up her task.

“For not telling him the truth,” Greed says, at first making a pointed effort not to look at her but then looking at her intently. He’s not going to be the kind of coward that looks away while he thanks someone for something. “And the other thing. Though I have to admit, I didn’t think you’d really go that far—mmbf!”

Her hands are suddenly covering his mouth and he raises his eyebrows, then knits them as he moves her arms down. “What was that about?”

“Well, I—" She looks away now, and he tips his head to the side. Which makes her look the other way, wringing her hands. They go back and forth like this until she shoves his face with a little more force than she’d usually use on Ling’s body, though it doesn’t hurt. “Knock it off! I didn’t tell him, okay!?”

“You didn’t—” Greed looks back at her, eyes wide. He makes a sweeping gesture with his arms, as if all of the sand in the desert could encompass his clear disbelief. “How could you _not_ tell him you put the Philosopher’s Stone in his body!?”

“I just figured if I did then he’d ask why I did it, and then I’d have to tell him what you did!”

“And you couldn’t figure any way to work around that?”

“You wanted me to lie to him _directly_?” 

“How is this not lying to him!?”

“It’s just omission!” It’s clear in her tone, the desperate way she says it, that she’s probably spent the last two months justifying this to herself. “I thought it would hurt him more to know that you died saving him.”

“But I _didn’t_ die—”

“I didn’t know that for certain at the time!”

Greed rubs at his own head, which he knows pulls some of the strands loose from his ponytail, but then gives up at whatever that was supposed to do and kneels down to hoist Feng Wu over his shoulder. 

“Well, he’s gonna hear about it when he wakes up anyway. No way can I justify how I’m back without including that little detail.” He tips his head down a little and closes his eyes, focusing inwards, but it doesn’t seem like Ling has come to yet. So he shifts Feng Wu on his shoulder and looks at Lan Fan. “Alright, let’s get going. It’s a long way back to Xing.”

———

Ling stirs to life again somewhere at the halfway mark between the desert settlement and Xing. Greed had been advocating for taking the more _practical_ methods of travel, but Lan Fan repeatedly shut him down by informing him that people in Xing thought that Ling was still in a coma. If people on the more conventional routes—like the waterways—saw him then it would cause an uproar in Xing. Apparently just about everything risked causing an uproar in Xing.

So while they hunker down to camp and avoid the sunlight some hours after the fight with Feng Wu, Greed lets him step back up. Lan Fan drops to her knees like she can _sense_ when the swap happens, which Greed finds kind of freaky even from the back of their conjoined minds.

She spills her guts right there, about putting the Stone in his body when he was in the coma. She explains that Greed surfaced sometime while he was out and said that she could save him but didn’t know for sure. She panicked and gave him the Stone after he passed out, thinking it was the only way to save his life. The only thing she could do was give Greed the one thing that _may_ have given him more power. The power to keep Ling alive.

She’s fighting back tears by the time she finishes. Her head is bowed, pressed to the hands she’s set on the sand, but Ling doesn’t need to see her eyes to know. He can hear it in her voice, the pinched quality of it.

“I’m so sorry!” Lan Fan tells him. “You have every right to exile me or even call for my death for my betrayal—”

“Lan Fan—” 

“ _Oh jeez_ ,” Greed speaks up. “ _Here we go._ ”

“—I lied to you, and I used the Stone you entrusted me to protect. Extinguishing my life—”

“ _Why does she jump straight to killing herself? Is that really healthy?_ ”

“Be quiet,” Ling murmurs through gritted teeth, like giving an aside to someone, and raises his hands in a ‘slow down’ gesture. “—Lan Fan—” 

“—is the mildest punishment I deserve. I—”

“ _Lan Fan!_ ” He shouts. She finally stops and looks at him. Then, a moment later, realizes what she’s doing and drops her head down hard on her hands. He sighs, just glad that she’s stopped. “You’re going to get sand in your eyes.”

“I deserve much worse for my treason.”

Ling crouches down, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Doing what you thought was necessary to save my life isn’t treason, Lan Fan.” He looks over to Feng Wu, who Greed punched into unconsciousness again when she woke up. “Feng Wu committed treason. You just did what you had to, isn’t that right?”

He can hear her sniffling as she reluctantly sits up and back on her legs. She lifts her mask to wipe at her eyes. “That’s no excuse.”

“Just explain to me why you didn’t tell me when I woke up,” he says.

“ _Do we really have to get into that?_ ” Greed speaks up, groaning in the back of his head. “ _She did what she had to to keep you alive. You’re alive. She’s not a traitor. Happy ending! Does the rest of that really matter?_ ”

“—and I just didn’t want to hurt you any further. You’d already been through—”

“Wait, wait.” He raises his hand to stop her. “Greed was talking. I didn’t hear you.” He puts his palms together. “Sorry, please start again.”

“ _Do we really—_ ”

“Not you, Greed!” He says, twisting his head a little to frown over his shoulder as if he were standing there. “I was talking to Lan Fan.”

With a sudden surge, Ling is yanked backwards and out of control of his body again. It’s a jarring feeling that makes him stumble and fall across the crystal lake of his mind, even though, by all accounts, it’s really just his soul getting moved around. “ _What are you doing, Greed?! Hey!_ ”

On the outside, Greed raises a single finger to cover his mouth, looking at Lan Fan. He whispers, “You promised.”

“ _I can still hear you! You didn’t_ actually _throw me across the desert!_ ”

“Only because the option wasn’t available!” Greed snaps.

“He has the right to know the truth,” Lan Fan says, and seems to find it easier to steel her nerves now that she isn’t actually faced with Ling. Great. He’s so relieved that she could do that.

“Don’t you value keeping your oaths and all that? Not breaking your promises to him and whatever?”

“ _What are you hiding!? Greed! Stop ignoring me! Hey!_ ”

“I do,” Lan Fan agrees, frowning at him. “But you’re not my lord.”

“ _What?_ ” Greed asks, incredulous. “C’mon, Lan Fan! I thought we had an agreement here!”

She cups her hands around her mouth, talking louder. “My lord, that day, you woke up from your coma and—”

“ _Greed, no!_ ” 

Greed lunges at her, knocking her backwards into the sand and fighting to cover her mouth. She seems to be anticipating this, though, because she catches his wrists and starts trying to hold them off.

“—it was actually Greed—!” She yells.

“You don’t…have to yell…” Greed grunts, still trying to get his hands down over her mouth. “Why are you so strong!?”

“ _Keep going, Lan Fan!_ ”

“She can’t hear you, dumbass!” He snarls, but doesn’t take his eyes off of Lan Fan in front of him. Her automail is shaking. He could probably break it if he wanted to, but does he want to? It’ll really piss the prince off.

“He…told me…” She grunts, kicking and scrambling until she can get her feet under him. She pushes at his stomach, not a kick but just trying to wedge some distance between them. He drops his whole weight on her. 

“Shut up or I’ll turn your arm to scrap metal! I swear I’ll do it!”

“ _You will do no such thing!_ ”

She does not shut up, of course. Of course she doesn’t. Just his luck.

“Not to…tell you…because he said you’d…be annoying…if you found out…he lied…again! _Arg!_ ” 

Greed throws himself backwards to sit in the sand. “Dammit! What the hell?” He points at her. “I changed my mind, you can off yourself now for this deep, _deep_ betrayal of trust.”

“That’s not up to you,” she pants, pushing herself to also sit up, one leg slightly bent and leaning back in the sand a bit. “My lord deserves to know the truth.”

“Oh!” He crosses his arms, frowning at her. “Just admit it! You didn’t want to be the only one in trouble!”

She gasps. “That is a _farce!_ Don’t listen to him, my lord!”

“Stop _yelling!_ He can _hear_ you! He—” Greed frowns then, realizing that he hasn’t heard anything from Ling since that last remark about not destroying Lan Fan’s arm. He turns his head a little. “Ling?”

Nothing. 

“Hey, Ling? You in there?” He tips his head left and right, as if that would actually do anything to shake him around. Of course it doesn’t work that way. Greed can feel him inside, so he knows he’s not gone suddenly. He’s just not talking. He throws his hands up, looking at Lan Fan. “Great! Now he’s not talking to either of us!”

He flops onto his side then, putting his back to Lan Fan, and folds his arm under his head.

Somehow, this is worse than him being annoying.

———

Later, after he and Lan Fan take refuge in their tent and he’s laying back down on a bed roll, he tries talking quietly.

“I’m…” He lets out a rush of air and then pulls another one in, the way people do before causing themselves themselves some sort of necessary pain. “I’m sorry, alright?”

No response. 

He gets a little louder, a little more demanding, “C’mon, kid, that wasn’t exactly _easy_ for me to say. You could give me _something_.”

Silence.

He sighs and quiets his voice again. “Alright, alright. I get it.”

His brain prickles with pain all over, but he knows that’s not Ling’s doing. It’s similar to what he felt when he got his memories back beneath Amestris. When he cradled Bido’s body in his arms and remembered the brutal murder of his other friends. It’s that sort of pain.

He thinks it’s called “guilt.”

———

Sometime between his attempt to talk to Ling and the sun setting enough for them to travel again, Ling takes over his body once more.

Greed doesn’t fight it.

———

“ _Oww!_ ” Ling groans as Lan Fan applies aloe to the tops of his shoulders and the back of his neck. His bed is soft and nice underneath him, but he wishes it would stop being so uncomfortable against the sore parts.

“Stop complaining,” Lan Fan chides him, and he presses his face against his arms.

“Blame Greed,” he mumbles. “He’s the one who fixed my head so I can feel pain again.”

“ _Hey, you asked for it back._ ” Greed argues from a familiar point in the back of his mind. “ _Don’t start whining now._ ”

“You could have at least kept control of my body to regenerate the cells!”

“ _Nope, that’s what you get. Consider it a ‘welcome back pain receptors’ thing. You should be happy you can feel again, considering how bothered you were when you couldn’t._ ” 

“Why, you—”

“Hold still,” Lan Fan commands, pushing down on his back a little bit to keep him on the bed. He relents under the soothing touch of aloe across his skin, turning his face to rest it more comfortably on the fold of his arms. The breeze trickling in from the open door also helps, cooling the aloe that’s smeared across his skin already.

“Why did it take you so long to manifest?” Ling asks, because it’s only in the past few days that he’s overcome his rage enough to even try speaking to Greed again. Part of it came simply from the exhaustion of holding a grudge when faced with everything else that’s happened since his return.

Upon returning to Xing, Lan Fan took Feng Wu to be jailed until she could face trial for her treason. He had to sneak back into the palace in order to maintain the illusion that he’d been in a coma the whole time. The ruse was lifted as news spread that he’d “woken,” finally, but there were—and still are—many meetings to be had with the leaders of each clan. Of course, his family had come to see him promptly in some measure upon hearing that he was awake, but he hadn’t had the chance to meet with them for long.

Greed had been staying inside most of the time except for a few moments when he came to the forefront when they were alone. He didn’t, after all, want to give Ling the notion that he was back just to be a voice in the back of his mind. Despite his anger and hurt, Ling couldn’t deny the comfortable familiarity of having Greed in his head again.

“ _The Philosopher’s Stone that Lan Fan gave me wasn’t mine,_ ” Greed explains. “ _It took me some time to get attuned to it. I actually wasn’t sure I’d gotten it until I was out in the open. It seemed like there was still a chance it might reject me up until the last minute there._ ”

“I didn’t know Philosopher’s Stones could reject something like that,” Ling muses, resting his chin on his folded arms. He quiets his voice, his brow creasing in consideration of the facts. “So there really was a chance that I could have died back there?”

“ _A pretty big one, I’d say. But lucky for you, there was just enough of me left floating around in your bloodstream that I could manage to merge the two stones._ ”

Even without saying it, both of them know that there’s really no sense in lingering on what might have happened but, at the same time, there’s an intense weight in the reality. Greed probably wasn’t even fully attuned when he pushed through to the surface, but whatever resolve it was that he had found in that moment seemed to be enough to force the Stone into submission. 

Ling’s honestly more surprised that his body survived having it in his bloodstream when he was so weakened by the poison. He remembers the pain when Father put it in him the first time. He didn’t feel any of that this time around. Is it possible that his body simply remembered what it was like to have a Stone inside of it? Or was not feeling it Greed’s doing, too?

He turns his head a little bit, raising his left hand a little bit from his arm so he can look at the ouroboros stamped on the back. It’s impossible to completely fight down the smile.

“Hey, Greed.”

“ _Huh?_ ”

“I knew you’d be back,” he replies, lowering his hand back to rest on his arm again as Lan Fan finishes applying the aloe.

“ _You’re not getting sentimental on me, are you? Because I’m going to have to step up again just to throw up if you are._ ”

Ling hums a little, amused, and tips his head down against his arm again. “Yeah? Then you either have to deal with the sunburn or heal it for me. Either way I win.”

Greed laughs. “ _You wish._ ”

———

It’s later now and the sun has set. Lan Fan is off on her watch, making sure that no one else gets any ideas in their heads about finishing him off.

He’s on the edge of the pool that runs through his courtyard, his traditional clothes pulled up so he can dip his feet into pond. It’s not that deep. His feet can touch flat to the surface on the edge and it only ripples gently around his calves, a few inches above his ankles. The water is still somewhat warmed from the sunshine throughout the day, but the night air threatens a rapid cool.

He bows his head a little and takes a deep breath, closing his eyes.

Switching places with Greed is as fluid as the water his feet are in. The way it conforms around the awkward shape of his foot, melding to accommodate him so easily, is exactly what it feels like in his mind. They move around each other, the way the water fills the space between his toes and under the arch of his foot and around his ankle. They don’t quite occupy the same space, but they flow around each other so closely that it seems like they should.

He used to be floating in a sea of souls, the groans and horror of Xerxes' lost people, but the space in his mind looks different now. The souls are still there, contained in the mirror surface of a smooth crystal lake. It’s not so much that there’s a barrier between him and them as it is they’re respecting, down to the razor’s edge, some line between the two places. Between Greed’s stone and his blue, avaricious sky.

Now, instead of floating as the face of his Ultimate Shield in front of him, he can see Greed on the inverted side of the lake, like a reflection that feels no obligation to mirror his movements. 

Ling sits on the surface of the lake, which ripples under him but doesn’t give away and isn’t wet. It’s comfortable when he sits, crossing his legs and slouching forward a little so he can plant one elbow on his thigh and rest his palm on the other leg. 

In the world of reflection, in the swirling mass of souls, Greed stands and takes his place in their shared body.

———

“Tch.” He raises his arms to look at the flowing, elaborate garb that Ling is wearing. The worst part about it is that he knows that this is pretty _casual_ compared to the actual ceremonial stuff. He immediately starts feeling around for the spot where the sash is tied around his waist so he can loosen it. “You couldn’t have changed first?”

“ _Why would I do that? These are comfortable!_ ”

“They’re _excessive_ ,” he argues back, finally managing to find the knot and tug it loose. He drops it off to the side, on the ground, before going for the rest of the material. Thankfully, once he undoes the sash the rest of it seems to fall off pretty easily. He pushes it off and stands up, now left in the pants that Ling rolled up to about his knees.

“ _This is kind of surprising, coming from the guy who swapped out my usual clothes for all those layers back in Amestris,_ ” Ling points out.

“Yeah, yeah,” Greed replies, rolling his head to the side and stretching out his arms. In reality, Ling’s body is just as well toned and nimble as it ever was. Maybe better. He looks down over himself a little. “You really grew up. It’s nice not to be stuck in the body of a little brat anymore.”

“ _I couldn’t stay fifteen forever._ ”

Greed can feel Ling frowning. Well, that’s probably not the best way to put it. He can feel him feeling _something_ that’s probably making him frown. He’s not exactly nuanced with emotions, but he’s pretty good with facial expressions and guessing emotions from those expressions. Shockingly, the concept of greed doesn’t really care that much about other people’s feelings. Who knew?

He sighs, putting his hands on his hips. “Well? Spit it out.”

“ _You lied to me,_ ” Ling says, and there’s an only slightly contained feeling in his words. Rage? “ _Again._ ”

Greed crosses his arms. “Yeah. You know, I was kinda hoping when you started talking to me again that meant that maybe we’d moved on from that whole lying thing.”

His voice is a little prodding, downright hopeful, he thinks, but Ling’s voice is pretty resolute. “ _You said you don’t believe in telling—_ "

“I know what I said! Jeez, Ling, it came out of my mouth. You think I don’t know what I said?” He turns and wades through the water so he can step up onto the grass again. 

“ _Then why did you lie?_ ”

“Because I’m not a masochist or a sadist,” he replies, stooping to pick up the bunched up clothes he left on the ground. “I wasn’t going to lie to you, but then the whole _murdering traitor_ thing happened and I wasn’t sure I’d be back. I didn’t want to get your hopes up if I was just gonna disappear on you again.”

“ _So you lied to make it easier on you?_ ”

“What?” He rears back, sliding his eyes off to the side as if he could possibly find some way for this body to look at a soul inside of his head. It’s going to take some getting used to again. “Where did you get that from?”

“ _It’s just like that day with Father, when you lied that we’d fight him together! Instead of fighting him with me, you sucker punched me!_ ” Yep. That’s probably rage in Ling’s voice. Greed has a solid lock on that now. 

“Hey, I did that to save your life—”

“ _Did you? Or did you do it just so you could have the glory?_ ”

“Shut up!” He snarls. The rage hits him so fast and so hard that he almost thinks a board smacked into the back of his skull. He stops walking back towards the house and freezes where he is, his entire body coiling so tight that it hurts. “I did it because it was the only way I could make sure that you survived along with everyone else. 

We _might_ have beaten him if we fought together, but there’s no saying that your body would have survived. Then what? Everyone else gets to live but you? No way was I going to let that happen. No way was I—”

“ _—going to turn your back on something you wanted._ ”

The sound of those familiar words in that familiar voice jars him from his rage, but the sudden crash from a such a powerful high leaves his body shaking a little. He looks at the clothes he’s gripping so hard that it’s a miracle the fabric doesn’t tear in his hands. He could probably pull it apart if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. They’re still a little warm from being on Ling’s body a moment ago.

“Right,” he murmurs. “So I lied. And I lied the second time because I already had to see your pathetic, sad face once; I didn’t want to see it again.”

“ _Hmm,_ ” Ling hums in quiet acknowledgement.

Greed forces a breathless chuckle, looking up from the clothes towards the sky. “Plus, I figured you’d never find out about it.”

“ _You’re ruining the moment._ ” But Ling’s voice feels calmer now, and he doesn’t feel the ferocity of their clashing emotions anymore. It’s just the two of them co-existing again, that easy ebb and flow of their souls side-by-side. “ _Ever since that day, my body has always felt like it was only half full. This is the first time in three years that it feels like it fits again._ ”

“You sure that’s not because of all these loose clothes you wear?” Greed asks, continuing into the bedroom. He tosses the clothes out across the bed.

“ _Very funny,_ ” Ling replies, and though there’s virtually no pause between what he says and what follows, the shift in his tone makes it seem like there is. “ _Hey, Greed. Can you get up onto the roof?_ ”

He snorts. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Can _I_ get up onto the roof?”

Heading back out onto the walkway, he scales one of the wooden support boards high enough that he can grab onto the edge of the roof. It’s not until he’s up there that he frowns, ducking his head again as if Ling were behind him. No. It’s really more like if Ling were on his back. 

“Wait,” he frowns. “Why am I on the roof?”

Ling laughs. It’s weird. Greed has, for the past three years, been hovering around in Ling’s body. The only time he could really get himself anywhere near him was when he was asleep, because that was when his mind was at its most vulnerable. Beyond that, he mostly just remembers a haze. It was like drifting in a pool of water where sounds were muted and he lost track of if he was feeling anything at all. 

Ling didn’t laugh much in his dreams.

Though he can remember him laughing three years ago, hearing it now is strange. It’s strange the way his hair is even longer than it was back then. It’s strange the way Greed almost wants to ask him if he’s cut it even once in three years. It’s strange the way he wants to know what the last three years were like for Ling, because all he remembers are his most intense emotions. All he knows are the loneliness and stress that manifested as weights in his dreams.

“ _I want to show you something,_ ” Ling replies. “ _This isn’t the right roof, though. I mean up there._ ”

Greed feels a pulling his head to crane his neck upwards, towards an impressive tower that extends from an opening to the west of the palace, still within the palace walls. He heads in that direction, first walking and then running. He gets a running jump so he can land on the second rung up, starting to climb up.

“You still didn’t answer my question,” he points out, because the work isn’t so taxing that he has to focus on it.

“ _Stop being a spoil sport. I said I wanted to show you something._ ”

“And you can’t tell me what it is?”

“ _You’re almost there, anyway._ ”

Greed tries to make sure that Ling can tell that he’s rolling his eyes, but it’s hard to communicate backwards like that. He can feel things that Greed feels, but he can’t tell if Ling feels what he feels. On some level he knows that he does. It’s an innate knowledge that comes from assumption. Assumption that he can’t be the only one between the two of them that feels this, because that would be unfair.

He climbs up over the edge of the last rooftop, getting to the top of the tower. It’s pretty high off the ground, now that he looks down. He’s not afraid of heights, so mostly it’s just impressive. Still, he falls back to sit on the roof, closing his eyes and bending his legs up a little so he can rest his elbows on them.

“Whew! That was a hell of a climb. One of us is out of shape.”

“ _Stop complaining and take in the view!_ ” Ling commands, though his voice is still framed in laughter, in lightness.

“Huh? What…” Greed opens his eyes and looks out from his perch on the tower, his chest tightening so fast and so hard that it knocks the word from him. “…view.”

All of Xing glows around them. 

The streets stretch way beyond what Greed can see, but the lights go on into forever. Buildings are lit up with lights and fires inside but the people out and about are illuminated by the glow of colored street lanterns. It paints the surrounding city in gold light, accented by red from the lanterns. The fact that they’re up here at night lets the speckles of light extend far into the distance, and Greed’s inability to fathom the size makes his brain buzz. In his two hundred years, he’s sure he’s traveled across Amestris at least a hundred times in no clear pattern. But the feeling he gets now from Xing is beyond measure.

“ _Welcome to Xing, Greed,_ ” Ling says, and maybe the buzzing in his head is Ling’s excitement. Or maybe it’s his own. Maybe they’re mingling together, in that space where their souls touch. He’s not sure. But he thinks he understands now what Ling meant when he said he felt only half full until now, because this feeling is too big to contain; it’s on the edge of tearing his seams. “ _All of it is ours!_ ”


	5. Chapter 5

Ruling Xing does not suddenly get easier just because Greed is with him. If this were a fairy-tale, like the ones in the books he read as a child, then it probably would. Greed reappearing in his life and in his body would, in those worlds, set everything straight. He’d become the best emperor in all of Xing’s history. Of course, there would be no reason given for this in those worlds. It would just be because he got Greed back that things would find a way to work out.

They don’t.

But that’s what Greed’s presence does. Greed’s presence makes it okay that they don’t.

It turns out, as Ling had predicted during that final fight with Father, that Greed doesn’t really want to rule. Ruling a country is politics and meetings and compromise. It’s paperwork and trade routes and diplomacy. Unsurprisingly, Greed kind of hates that sort of thing (especially the compromise part). He finds it boring.

See, tyranny would be easy. The combination of them could easily kill any political opponents they had and instate whatever rules and regulations they wanted. They could ignore the wants and needs of their citizens and simply force the country to conform to what they want for it. Intimidation. Subterfuge. These things are all completely viable methods of rule, but they are cruel.

But Greed, Ling knows (and Greed knows that Ling knows), is more complicated.

Because that day on the battlefield of Amestris, Ling felt Greed’s bittersweet yearning as people cheered for Edward Elric, and it was clear that he could never be a tyrant. He could never be a dictator that people hated because, in the depths of his heart, all Greed ever wanted was to be liked en masse.

All he wants is to be cheered on by his friends.

———

With Greed in his body again, Ling is again a homunculus.

With Greed in his body again, Ling is again immortal. And this solves about as many problems as it creates.

———

The Xing Empire has thrived on his father’s traditions. It is an empire not just in name but in nature: gradually it expanded outwards from a small point. Gradually it claimed lands and, with them, people. Time and war brought them under the sweeping umbrella of the Xing Empire. A wife from each clan created fidelity to his rule. A child from each clan created fifty heirs to his power. The fact that it also bred infighting, assassination of children, and other such extremes didn’t faze his father. Xing was bound to him, but it was not united under him.

Ling seeks to change that, but he is not met with acceptance by all. 

As Xing falls into civil war a year after Greed returns, Ling suffers.

It hurts him to see his people fighting when all he wanted was peace. It pains him to see the Xingese people at each other’s throats, though he knows that they always have been. The only difference is now it’s out in the open. He grieves to see his people suffering, in pain, because of his best efforts to make sure that they never had to feel this way again. To create a rule where this sort of fighting wouldn’t be happening in the shadows anymore.

But the fights that happened in the shadows have still left wounds, and the civil war that breaks out in Xing is a time for bloodletting. 

He refuses all outside aid, primarily from Amestris. Thankfully, those clans that reject his ideas are some of the most staunch isolationists. They would rather be smothered alone than ask for help from outside allies. Ling knows those on their Eastern border have tried, hoping to manipulate the situation, but they are no more willing to get closer once refused than a person is willing to stick their hand between two fighting cats.

They will keep this war to Xing and Xing alone.

Out of the fifty clans that compose Xing, forty two are with him. It’s a sweeping majority of the clans but not a sweeping majority of the people. Many of the clans are like the Chang clan, small and in need of protection. Ling has to have them pulled closer to the capitol before they’re attacked by those who stand against him. Mei Chang is forced to leave her home, and Ling cannot bow low enough to her for it. To all of the Chang clan, and those like her.

But when he looks at them, he sees steel and pride. He sees a resolution to follow him. He sees faith that they made the right choice.

He will not disappoint them. He stands, resolute, with the people of Xing behind him.

———

Lan Fan reminds him that he’s not a fifteen year old scion anymore. He can’t run off into wars and fight when it’s his life and his rule that his people are dying for. If anything were to happen to him, she says, then this entire war would be in vain.

He knows that she speaks the truth. He knows that she’s making sense and her logic is sound.

But he also knows that his followers, his people, are dying. He knows that the longer this drags on, the more Xing will be torn apart. The more lives will be lost. He knows that the more people who help, the quicker it will be quashed. He can’t just come out of this war having won. He must come out of it with as much of Xing’s integrity left as possible.

For that reason, he cannot simply sit back and let it unfold. For that reason, rumors start to spread of a covert assassin group that decimates anti-Yao settlements near the capitol. For that reason, the chief rumor speaks of a person mixed in the group who fights unlike any Xingese martial artist seen before: a person wearing a gray demon mask with accenting red lines and white teeth with pronounced tusks.

———

The war wages for three years.

Sometimes he thinks that the only thing carrying him through to the end is Greed’s voice on the nights when he’s as broken as his country, telling him that avarice is still a sin, even if its intent is noble. All sins receive their just desserts at some point, but if it’s worth suffering the punishment for then it’s worth seeing through.

———

Ling is twenty-one when the rebel faction lays down their arms, though he looks no older than eighteen. The only way to really tell his age, the only way to hope to grasp it, is by looking in his eyes. Dark eyes cut with pink lines and an exhaustion that begets someone who sparked a war across a country he hoped to protect. In that way, Ling is much older than twenty-one.

Out of the eight clans who stood against him five are assimilated across the other clans. Their numbers are devastated compared to before the war, though that’s only a small reason for it. Those five are the clans that stood against him the loudest, the ones that committed the most heinous atrocities to weaken his people and unnerve him. Though he hates to do it, the assimilation dilutes their toxicity. It lets their children grow up amongst more peaceable people, and hopefully lets the hatred die out with time.

The remaining three are given aid and allowed to return to their homelands. Their involvement, he comes to learn, was either unwillingly done because he couldn’t get to them fast enough or was worn out by the end of the three years. Many of them returned to him in whatever numbers they could, though on paper they stayed allied with the rebels. He goes easier on them, and gives them seats as his counsel.

Officially, Xing is now down to forty-five clans. The unification by concubines and scions is done away with, and Ling instates a council system. Every clan is heard equally with one representative at his table, regardless of size. 

Those clans that he pulled into the capitol to protect are allowed to go back to their lands to rebuild. Alphonse Elric is finally able to safely return to Amestris with Mei Chang at his side. They resume construction of the railroads across the desert between Xing and Amestris, completing what had already been started in a matter of months.

For the first time in six years, Ling visits Amestris.

———

“ _Do you think Al kept his promise?_ ” Ling asks, taking a rest on the crystal lake. Greed is walking down a long, long road that leads to a house that doesn’t seem to be getting any closer and it is annoying.

“How should I know?” Greed points out. “I don’t even know why you made him promise not to tell in the first place.”

Ling’s voice is somewhat playful, but also a little appalled. “ _That would ruin the fun! We haven’t seen Edward or Winry in years!_ ”

“So let me get this straight,” Greed replies. “Let’s say I came back in my own body, you’d have been just as fine with showing up with me and telling them, ‘Oh, by the way, look! Greed’s not dead!’”

“ _Yep!_ ” 

Greed chuckles. “You’re pretty sick, kid.”

Lan Fan frowns. “Don’t speak of my lord that way.”

Greed rolls his eyes.

Finally they get to the house. He knows that Al told them that they’d be visiting, of course, because it was more efficient than sending a letter. He’s just got a foot on the porch when the door flies open suddenly. He definitely has not managed to raise his head from making sure his foot was on the step before a body knocks him backwards off of it.

“Ling!”

“Ack!” 

He hits the dirt on his back and slides a little ways, but Mei Chang doesn’t seem particularly fazed by it. Clearly she’s taken to Amestris’ more liberal acceptance of public displays of affection.

“It’s _Greed,_ ” he grunts. She pulls back and sits up, looking at him.

“Oh! I guess that explains your clothes, then,” she says, lifting his coat up in indication.

“Off, off,” he says, and she climbs off of him, letting him sit up. Of course now he’s covered in dirt, which stands out on his black clothes. He mutters, “Seriously…?”

“There’s a blast from the past,” says a familiar voice from the doorway. Edward Elric stands there looking at him, a hand on his hip and his brow raised. “Why are you dressed like Greed?”

“ _Oh good! Al and Mei Chang kept their promise!_ ”

“Because I _am_ Greed,” he replies, with all casualness, more interested in standing up and dusting himself off. 

It’s pretty easy to hear the disbelief in Ed’s voice when he breathes out, “No way…but you…”

Greed tips his head back a little, chuckling. “Okay, you got me there. His reaction is priceless.” 

“ _I told you it would be._ ”

He looks back at Edward again, tipping his head. “It’s a long story, but you didn’t really think that I was gone for good, did you? No way was I going to let my old man get the best of me—”

“He would have gotten the best of you if I didn’t have a Philosopher’s Stone,” Lan Fan says, crossing her arms.

“No one asked for your input,” Greed tells her, frowning.

“ _Hi, Ed!_ ”

“Ling says hi, by the way,” Greed says, waving a hand as if he could hurry the formalities along. He starts back up the porch again. “Listen, reunions, friendship, I’m not dead, blah blah blah. I get it. Happy times. But do you have something to drink? I just had to walk up your obscene driveway and I swear the trip from Xing to Amestris was shorter.”

He brushes past Ed, but in all reality Ed lets him to do. Greed can hear him chuckle, getting a handle on his shock. “Nice to see you, too, Greed.”

———

They stay up all night talking, he and Greed, Lan Fan, Ed, Winry, Al, and Mei Chang.

First they talk about everything, then they talk about the slightly less important anything. Six years is a long time, a lot to discuss, and yet when it wraps up it feels as though it was no time at all. It’s hard to fathom how the words and exchanges of stories can go by in the blink of an eye. The sun is rising and they all retire to bed to get some sleep with it threatening to keep them awake through the windows.

Winry and Edward are nice enough to let him have their room while they sleep in, to his understanding, a cot in Winry’s basement mechanic’s shop. The bed feels big when he slides into it, but only in the comfortable way. He stretches out, spread eagled as he can, before rolling over to get settled on his stomach. The pillows smell different than his, and he stares through partially opened eyes at the light filtering in against the curtains.

“Hey, Greed?” He says, quietly, because he really doesn’t need to speak that loudly for Greed to hear him. In fact, he thinks that he could just think the words and Greed would hear them but neither of them have really tried it. It seems weird to have a conversation with someone entirely inside. The one and only time they did it was just before he was reabsorbed. 

“ _Yeah? What is it, Ling?_ ” Greed sounds sort of tired, but also a bit attentive. If he were really that tired, then Ling doesn’t think he would have answered him.

“Hasn’t it been painful going through your life and losing everyone?” He asks. “I mean, only the other homunculus were immortal, right? So even if you had friends like the chimeras, they would have eventually died. Didn’t you get lonely?”

Greed’s quiet for a moment before he speaks up, “ _First of all, it’s worth saying that you suck at pillow talk._ ”

Ling smiles a bit, but he supposes he deserved that.

“ _Second of all…of course it did, moron,_ ” Greed continues, though his voice has some strength to it. He’s not wallowing in any sadness that Ling has called back from his memories. “ _What kind of stupid question is that?_ ”

“Well, you’ve never talked about it before!” Ling argues, his smile changing to a frown. 

“ _Since when do I ever talk about any of that feely crap?_ ” Greed asks, and Ling can practically hear him snorting. Of course he does. “ _Why are you thinking about this morbid stuff anyway?_ ”

Ling shifts, rolling onto his side, and folds his arm under his head. “After talking with everyone tonight, I realized that eventually they would all be gone, too. Even Lan Fan.”

Greed sighs. “ _Yep, that tends to be how it works. You having second thoughts?_ ”

Ling laughs a little, smiling at the window. “No way.” He tucks his head a little lower against his arm. “It’s too soon to look ahead to such depressing things. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

“ _It’s gonna pass in a blink, kid,_ ” Greed tells him.

“Who’s being morbid now?” Ling asks, pulling the blankets up a bit more so he can snuggle comfortably into them. He yawns. “Besides, I’m not alone. I’ve got you.”

Greed’s only answer is a disparaging sort of ‘tch’ sound, and when Ling turns himself inwards he can see Greed laying on his side of the crystal lake. But despite his attitude, Greed can’t hide the feeling of warmth that seeps out across the body they share.

———

The time doesn’t pass like a blink.

He supposes, for someone like Greed, it passes in a blink. He boasts that he’s over two hundred years old, but he can’t pin-point the number because he’s lost track of it. The years, for him, have probably blurred and smudged together that he can only remember certain things. Even then, he admits that a lot of it was lost by being reabsorbed by Father. He remembers his friends, but that’s mostly Ling’s doing. He pulled those memories out of Greed’s soul and nailed them to the walls of his mind so he wouldn’t forget again.

But for him, time passes reasonably. It passes the way life has always passed: without ceremony. Somedays he realizes how old he is, that he’s aging, that things are changing, but for the most part he doesn’t. In the studies of alkahestry and anatomy, it’s taught that the body does things like breathe naturally on its own because to remember every little sensation would put too much of a burden on the mind. That’s what life is. To acknowledge it all at once, to try to take it in every day at its fullest, would be too much for his mind to handle.

He makes twice-yearly trips to Amestris, save for exceptional situations. Edward and Winry’s wedding, as well as birthdays for their children. He goes to Amestris for Mustang’s inauguration as Furher, then again for his wedding to Hawkeye. They also come to visit Xing frequently, especially when Alphonse and Mei Chang move back for good in their later years.

He doesn’t marry or have children, so the children that the Elrics and the Mustangs bring into his life are a great joy. He’s glad that he gets to watch them grow, that he gets to spoil them despite their parents wishes. Or perhaps in spite of them. Can he really be blamed if Xing has some off the best toys and best candies known to man? Of course not. And it would be cruel not to share those things with their children.

As they get older, going from children to adults, they start to wonder about his immortal body in ways that silly stories can’t explain. Things like being touched by a star or eating a magical herb stop filling their eyes with wonder. He sits and talks with their parents about the best way to handle it, but ultimately they decide that the truth is the most productive. Especially since several of the children are practicing alchemy or alkahestry as it is.

So he stops being the silly uncle who has two totally different voices and names and personalities. He becomes the immortal homunculus….who is sometimes silly and has two totally different voices and names and personalities.

But in that moment there’s a turning point, a realization that starts to touch upon him the way sunlight starts to touch upon land as it dawn. And gradually, like sunlight, that realization starts to spread a little bit at a time. It seeps through his life slowly, but every new thing is a step down the path of eternity.

And eternity is still beyond Ling’s comprehension, even if it is not beyond Greed’s.

Greed has control of their shared form when they get news of Mustang’s passing, some four years after his retirement from the position of Furher. Ling remembers Greed’s words, that it’ll happen in a blink, because his memory is rooted in attending his inauguration. It doesn’t just seem like yesterday, the way people say at the reception when they get there, but it was yesterday for him. Greed keeps control as they venture to Amestris for his burial, at the surface, but Ling takes over to pay his respects to Hawkeye and the others.

She passes away two years later, and again he’s too weak. Again, he makes Greed carry him there, but he carries himself through. He weeps as he did for Fu, for Mustang, but he’s learned not to view his feelings as burdens. It would set a bad example for Greed. But it’s hard, losing people, and he knows that the life ahead of him is full of more loss than he can fathom. He’ll lose people he hasn’t yet met, and it scares him before it’s happened. The best he can do is stand resolute on what he told Greed that day: That he does not regret this path.

But not regretting it doesn’t make it an easier choice.

He watches Lan Fan grow older as well, though he knows that she’ll serve him until she’s Fu’s age or beyond it. Thankfully, in these times of peace, he knows that she won’t meet such a violent end. But that doesn’t make it any easier to kneel by her bedside with the rest of her family and say good-bye that cool spring evening. He holds her hand and stays with her all night as age takes her peacefully in her sleep.

It’s after Lan Fan dies that he decides it’s time for him and Greed to move on as well.

———

For some years, since his fortieth birthday, he’s started shrouding himself to hide that he isn’t aging. He rarely leaves the palace as Emperor Ling Yao, though he does frequently sneak out to be amongst them as just another clansman. He still holds his meetings with his council, but he wears a veil to keep his face hidden in addition to ceremonial clothes that cover his hands. He has to conceal all signs that reveal his body hasn’t aged since the day Greed came back.

“ _So remind me again why we went through all this hoopla of hiding the fact that you still look like a brat if we’re just going to throw it all away?_ ” Greed says, as he’s getting ready in the mirror.

“We’re not telling everyone,” he replies, frowning. “But we need to choose a successor, someone to take over Xing so that we can get on with our lives. I’m eighty-eight, Greed. My father was deteriorating by this age even with alkahestry.”

“ _I just don’t get why you can’t stick to the whole interview-and-tough-questions idea that you already have,_ ” Greed points out. “ _You said it yourself that the immortality thing would cause nothing but problems. Everyone’s out to get their hands on the secret to youth and you spent this whole time protecting Xing from the risks of that, but now you don’t care?_ ” 

“Of course I care!” Ling argues, though he doesn’t really yell. He still doesn’t like the implications, even the hints, that he doesn’t care about his people. He’s always cared about protecting them, and even though he _can_ rule forever, that doesn’t mean that he should. Immortal or not, his thoughts and his judgments aren’t infallible. Xing can only move forward if he moves on and makes room for someone new.

“ _Alright, alright. I get it,_ ” Greed replies, because he does. In these past decades together, Greed has gotten better about understanding the tide of emotions between them. Well, Ling’s not sure it’s that he’s gotten better at it so much as it is that he’s _trying_ now when he didn’t the last time they were together. 

For Ling it had been instinctual, that pull to look through Greed’s soul and find out everything he could. He’d always been listening to those emotions, trying to understand them, trying to understand him. But Greed hadn’t really cared, and he supposes that makes sense considering how he is. But he’s started caring more this time around.

“ _So, what’s the plan?_ ”

Ling explains to him that he’ll offer the position to his council members, and do interviews with those who are interested. He has questions, things he needs verified, but once he’s sure of who to pick then he’ll reveal himself to the person. It’s important how they handle it. So much of Xing is still secretive, so much involves a barrier between the ruler and their people, but he believes it’s for the safety of the country. The safety of the people. He doesn’t want to put someone in charge who will be a risk to that.

Greed is wary, but aside from taking over their shared body for the rest of eternity, there isn’t much that he can really do about it. Though that doesn’t stop him from threatening Ling extensively with what he’d like to do about it.

“You’re just worried about me,” he replies, sitting outside on his walkway. The summer air is warm, pleasant, but there’s enough of a breeze that it isn’t unbearable. 

“ _Of course I am, moron,_ ” he replies. “ _We share this body and you’re opening it up for someone to sell us out. Not that I don’t think I could rip apart anyone who tries anything._ ” He murmurs the last part as more of an afterthought before going back to his normal tone. “ _Why can’t you just wait until I can get my own body?_ ”

“We don’t know how long that will take,” Ling answers, though it’s nothing that the two of them don’t already know. “The only way you were separated from me the first time was because Father had a connection to you and reabsorbed you. Now that the stone is in my body, we don’t know how to extract it. It’s going to take a long time to figure that out, even with the Elric’s children studying it. I don’t want to upset the country’s growth and balance by being Emperor for the next two hundred years in the meantime.”

There’s a pause before Greed relents. “ _Yeah, I guess I can’t say that makes a lot of sense either._ ”

“And you said yourself you don’t want to rule a world you haven’t seen,” he points out. “It’s time for us to go. We both know that. So let’s do it properly.”

“ _I really hope this doesn’t come back and bite us in the ass._ ”

That makes Ling laugh, folding his hands in his sleeves. “When does life ever offer those kind of guarantees?”

———

Ling puts forward the option to the council. Not all of them are interested. Some are too young and know that their inexperience will only hinder them. Some are older and don’t want to bear the burden of such a responsibility just as they’re planning to retire from their council seats. But there are plenty, in his council of forty-five, who express an interest. Ling explains that he will meet with all of them personally to conduct interviews after narrowing down the pool, and then make his selection.

He and Greed stay up into the night pouring over the preliminary candidates, weeding them out by various qualifications: too little time served in a council seat, past transgressions, misconduct in council meetings.

Through stringent guidelines, they manage to weed out twenty two of those who have put themselves forward for the position. That leaves them with six candidates to interview. 

They spend the following night coming up with questions that will, hopefully, elicit honest answers.

———

“What would your response be to someone who challenges your rule?”

“I would tell them that you chose me for a reason,” the candidate from Wei responds, respectful. There’s admiration, clear and gleaming, in his eyes. Ling walks with him through the courtyard, where he’s holding all of his interviews.

“And why would you point to me?” He asks.

“Because you’re a kind, wise ruler,” he explains. “You rule may have led to civil war in Xing but it also lead to true unification. You’ve brought the clans together as a people, rather than as servants to a system.”

“ _Flattery,_ ” Greed says. “ _Nice to hear, but that wasn’t the question._ ”

“And you think that because I did that, that my judgment would be an infallible justification for your rule?” Ling asks, not ignoring Greed but not reacting to him either.

“I do.”

“ _Too bad for you,_ ” Greed sighs.

———

“If a conflict were to arise between the remaining Shang family and Bu Clan, how would you keep the conflict from escalating?”

The candidate from Bu hesitates. She hesitates, because following the civil war, her family was assimilated into the Bu Clan. She’s in her forties, too young to remember a war that’s now seventy years passed. But she knows her family’s history. She knows what came, and that the Shang family is a subset of the Bu Clan. Though they are assimilated, there is history there.

“ _Taking a little too long there, sweetheart._ ” Greed points out. “ _Seems like your loyalty might not be to Xing._ ”

She responds, but Greed is right. Her answer became moot the moment the conflict on her face became more important to her than the potential for conflict in Xing.

———

“If a conflict were to break out in Xing, similar to the one that happened decades ago, where would your focus lie?”

The candidate from Xiang seems pained. “And this is to assume that nothing could be done to prevent it?”

Ling is a bit surprised that she goes backwards, but he nods. “Yes.”

She thinks about it carefully as they walk, looking down at the bridge as they start to cross it. “And what is the conflict about?”

She’s not the first to ask for more clarification on the circumstances, but he still feels something pull in his chest at the question. Or maybe it’s the buzz in his mind that tells him that Greed has also taken an interest. “Some of the assimilated clans have started to resist those clans they were broken down into, now that their numbers have grown.”

She nods, considering it. Her expression is pained, as if he were an envoy giving her the news rather than her emperor giving her a hypothetical situation. “I can think of many ways to have avoided such a conflict to start with, but…I suppose, if it’s already started…”

She muses for a few more minutes, and Greed speaks up. “ _I like her. I like a girl who doesn’t try to tear my country apart._ ”

Ling almost tells him to hush as he watches her through his veil, but he doesn’t. Though his mouth does start to open.

“I think the best course of action would to be to broker treaties as soon as possible. I imagine the resistance isn’t focused on taking over the other clan, but on separation to their own lands. They would want to become their own clan again,” she explains. “And though they might desire that independence, it doesn’t mean that their intentions are to wage the wars of their ancestors. The best way to keep Xing united is to show them that they can have their independence back, so long as they don’t give reason again to have it stripped away.”

Ling’s glad his expression is hidden behind his veil, because he raises his eyebrows at her and he’s certain he doesn’t want to give away how impressed he really is. She looks up at him with large, black eyes. Just like her grandmother’s.

“That’s why I’m surprised it couldn’t be solved prior to the conflict erupting,” she explains, politely. “I would like to broker such treaties before blood is shed.”

Link blinks.

“ _Not bad,_ ” Greed says, approvingly.

———

“What would your reaction be, should I pick someone other than you?”

The candidate from the Yao Clan considers it for a moment, but then speaks. “I would respect your decision and continue to serve the council so long as your replacement would have me.”

“You would remain on the council?” Ling asks, looking at him. 

He laughs. “Of course! I still have a people to serve, after all, and I don’t think it would be right of me to spite them over some hurt. I believe that you’ll pick the best candidate for Xing, and that may or may not be someone in your own Clan.”

Ling is impressed by the answer, but knowing his own family’s keen ability to mask their true intentions, he’s not sure what to believe. He also remembers the tenacity he was raised with to rule Xing. The tenacity that drove him to absorb a homunculus into his soul. 

“ _Hey!_ ” Greed says, at that thought. “ _I’m not such a bad guy!_ ”

He knows that Ling can’t argue back, but he tries to send some soothing thought to him. Some notion that he didn’t mean it that way, but it was something to consider all the same. That tenacity…it was no different than how the Wu Clan raised Feng Wu, and it’s only by his own family’s beliefs that he didn’t turn out as murderous as she. 

But is exchanging such brutal intent for subterfuge and deceit really any better?

———

“Would you uphold the council system, or disband it?”

“Uphold it, of course,” replies the candidate from the Sima Clan. “Though I think it could be modified.”

“Modified?” Ling asks, with genuine curiosity, because he has been seeking some way of making the system better. Though, in all this time, he hasn’t yet come upon one. He hasn’t yet managed to figure something out that would work. So for his entire time ruling, he has simply left it with one representative per clan.

“The larger clans should have more representatives, as they have more people to speak for.”

Ling nods. “Yes, but then, how do you handle the smaller clans? Their voices could easily be stifled for those who have a crowd of people.”

“Perhaps it would be best to have some of the smaller clans fall under the headings of larger clans,” he explains. “You yourself assimilated several of the defeated clans into other clans.”

“ _Because they were_ rebels _and that was a war,_ ” Greed says, almost argumentatively. In fact, he is arguing. It’s just that the Sima candidate can’t hear him to argue back.

“Yes, but that was to abate some of their hostility,” Ling explains, carefully. “I had hoped that by merging their clans, the future generations might become more peaceful.”

“One way to help keep Xing unified may be to assimilate some of the clans then as well, so that we’re united as a people under fewer clans,” he replies, his tone logical and sincere.

“ _I like where his head is at,_ ” Greed says. Ling rolls his eyes, not concerned for being seen since he still has his veil on.

“Well then that’s all the reason I need, isn’t it?” Ling responds, under his breath.

“What was that, Emperor Ling Yao?” The candidate asks. Ling raises his hand, bit flustered all of the sudden.

“N-Nothing! Please, let’s continue.”

———

“What do you think of secrecy?” Ling asks, sitting on the walkway surrounding the courtyard.

The candidate in front of him sits with her feet hanging off the edge it. She’s in her mid forties, already a mother of three, and has been sitting on the council for six years now. Though an advocate of his, she’s never been afraid to challenge him or present new ideas when they’re needed. But then, all of his candidates have been somewhere on the spectrum of that. All of them have been good allies and bold speakers for their clans.

“Secrecy,” she says, but doesn’t say it as a question to buy time. Rather she says it as a statement, like she needs to taste the word on her tongue to fully understand it. “I believe secrecy can be a necessity.”

“A necessity?” He asks, by way of getting her to explain.

“If one wants to throw a surprise party for someone, then secrecy is necessary for them to enjoy the surprise,” she continues. “If learning something might do a person more harm than good, then secrecy is necessary for their protection. Honesty is certainly important, and one needs to be very selective with the secrets they decide to keep, but it can be a crucial aspect to life.”

Ling watches her face as she watches the water. There are koi in the pond now, and they come up to investigate her, nipping at her ankles and feet. She smiles, and it reminds him of her mother.

“That’s a very wise answer, Clanswoman Chang,” he replies. “Does it come from experience?”

That makes her laugh. “I’m a mother of three, Emperor Ling Yao, I know a thing or two about honesty and secrets.”

“Yes, I suppose you would,” he agrees. There’s a pause between them, but she doesn’t seem hurried or impatient. “Secrecy from the palace has been both the prosperity and the downfall of Xing. I believe that it has its place to protect the stability of the country and its people. Sharing everything…it can lead to conflicts that may wage on for years before the people realize they’re fighting for nothing. Honesty has its place, and the people of Xing deserve to know the truth in much of its dealings, but honesty isn’t always the best course of action.”

He thinks back to lying about his coma to keep the Yao from attacking the Fau, an innocent clan being blamed for a crime they didn’t commit. He thinks back to raids on settlements in the war, while telling his people he was never away from the palace. Those things all worked out, and he doesn’t regret them. He can feel the ebb and flow of his people’s tensions like the heart that beats his chest, and he knows what would rile that steady pulse and what would soothe it. He needs someone who can do the same.

He focuses on her past the veil. “Would you be able to keep a secret from all of Xing, Clanswoman?”

He can see immediately that the understands the weight he’s sent out into the air between them and she thinks on it for a moment, considering her answer carefully. He really can’t imagine the thought that needs to go into it, the consideration that must be placed. For him, he supposes, it’s easier to look from the outside. It’s easier to hand the burden to someone than it is to bear it.

“If I thought it was best for the people of Xing, then I could keep any secret,” she replies, looking at him. “A ruler does not owe it’s people all the answers of the universe because seldom does a single ruler have them all. In those cases, it’s better to admit what one does know. But so long as my secrets don’t hurt Xing, so long as they keep the pulse of Xing steady, then I would keep them.”

He nods, though it’s really more bowing his head than anything. He considers her answer, though he knows that feeling in his chest. He recognizes it for anything.

“ _Not bad,_ ” Greed interjects. Probably because he can tell that Ling is feeling it. Maybe they’re feeling it together. Maybe they both approve, and that’s the gut sense of right that’s rolling around in him. “ _I’m almost impressed. She’s perfect, but not too perfect. But then, how could anyone be more perfect than me?_ ”

Ling chuckles a little, closing his eyes for a moment before he stands. “Would you come inside with me, Clanswoman Chang?”

“Of course,” she says, standing and picking up her shoes to follow him in.

“Good,” he replies. “There’s something I need to show you before I make my decision.”

———

The ninety-one year old Emperor, Ling Yao, dies peacefully in his sleep three years after choosing his replacement.

All of Xing grieves. There’s a procession, though on his last request he’s buried on Yao Clan lands rather than in the style of a grand tomb, like his father before him. 

No one sees the body. It’s in a casket with some personal effects when it’s buried. The person who placed them, the only person permitted to see his body, on his dying command, is Scion Chang.

———

Greed sits, cross legged, on a rooftop during the festival. A celebration of Ling’s life and of Empress Chang’s formal ascension to the throne. Not many people are on the rooftops, since there’s all sorts of noise to be made and fun to be had beneath them. It’s late in the evening now, though, so the ceremonies are starting to wind down.

The gentle wind over Xing pulls at his scarf and his hood, though it’s blowing at him in a way that doesn’t dislodge either of them from him. It’s cool, but not cold, with spring rising more and more each day but winter still clinging to the nights for itself. It’s not even so cold that he’s bothered by not wearing sleeves, though having his scarf pulled up over his nose does help keep the chill out that way. Noses tend to be more vulnerable.

“You gonna miss it?” He asks to the air.

“ _A little,_ ” Ling concedes. “ _But it’s not going anywhere. We’ll come back eventually. Especially once they figure out how to get you into your own body._ ”

“You’re sure we can trust her to keep it hidden for us?”

“ _We don’t really have a choice now,_ ” Ling points out. “ _But yeah, I think we can trust her. We just have to hope that whoever she chooses as her successor is up to the task as well, or that we manage to figure this out in the next forty years._ ”

Greed chuckles. “Well, never say never.”

Standing up, he stretches his arms over his head and rolls his neck, cracking it in a few spots. He hefts up the bag next to him, packed with some clothes, money, paperwork, and food. On the streets below, someone is starting to put out some of the more ornate lanterns. Tomorrow, they’ll start doing a proper clean up as the weeklong festivities come to an end.

Greed looks up towards the sky, putting his hands in his pockets. “Ready, partner?”

A ripple of thrill runs through him. It’s Ling’s excitement, the sort that practically buzzes down his backside and almost makes him shiver. He has to fight it down and he almost wants to tell him to stop it, but he doesn’t get the chance.

“ _Let’s go!_ ” Ling says, with laughter hinting at his tone. It’s been a while since he’s heard that stupid laugh. He still sounds like a damn kid. “ _We’ve got a world to see!_ ”

Greed blinks, a bit surprised, but then laughs, almost too loud. He can’t help it. Not when Ling seems so excited. Not when he knows he’s been looking forward to this for a while now. A point of light through the seemingly endless loss. He looks back up at the moon, unable to shake the grin as he reaches out towards it, covering it with his palm.

“Hell yeah, we do.”

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this fic, guys! It's all done with now.
> 
> I hope you liked the epilogue. I know it got really lost in some politics there in the middle and I skimmed over a lot, but I struggled with writing it a bit. I had an end point that I wanted to get to, but it wasn't easy to get there with so much time to cover. I figured skimming over some of it was really the only option that I had. Maybe someday I'll come back and write some one shots to fill in the blanks! But for right now we're at the close.
> 
> Thanks for all of your kind reviews and encouragement. I really appreciate you all taking the time to give me such nice words! Until next time! c:

**Author's Note:**

> A special thanks to raisingmybanner and luctor et emergo for their constant help and encouragement while writing this fic!
> 
> Title comes from "All the King's Horses" by Karmina.
> 
> Updates will come every Thursday until completion. c:


End file.
